Nobody is avoiding your site because they have to remember a password. That requirement hasn't killed eBay, Gmail, Amazon, PayPal, Facebook, Plentyoffish, HotOr

Nobody is avoiding your site because they have to remember a password. That requirement hasn't killed eBay, Gmail, Amazon, PayPal, Facebook, Plentyoffish, HotOrNot, news.yc, or any other site in history. So what are you saying -- that because there are successful sites that require passwords, that passwords aren't a problem for users? And this problem hasn't killed any sites that were really good? How do you know? Perhaps clever entrepreneurs can steer around the problem, but the point is that there could be a whole other class of apps enabled by a universal identity system. I happen to work on a site where the user can derive a lot of value from getting recommendations, based on their social network. We do well, but our biggest problem is that a new user doesn't know how good it can be once they've done the work of creating their own network. All over again. For every site that they use. The short-term answers are strategies such as you mention. Your points about delaying the need for signup are good advice for today. The long-term answer to this problem is not Facebook, or for everyone to get acquired by Yahoo or Google or whatever. The answer is to create an open or otherwise portable social network -- manage in one place, use everywhere. OpenID, or something like it, will be required for this. There are some big flaws in OpenID (the phishing problem for one) but at least some people are trying to address them.