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Comment by il | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't aware not having a Twitter account was considered pathological in our Web 2.0 world.

Why do I need to sign up for a microblogging platform to use a completely unrelated calendar app???

Anyway, my comments about reducing friction aren't based on my own preferences, they're based on dozens of multivariate split tests I have conducted across many thousand unique visitors.

Every single time, forcing the user to sign up, login, enter their email or anything of the sort before getting to use the site SIGNIFICANTLY decreases engagement, time on site, conversions, and pretty much every other metric you should care about.

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The "signup friction" argument's a straw men; no sane startup seeks to add friction to the signup process. the bogus (implied) assertion in the comment is that requiring a Twitter account to use a new web app in beta is overly restrictive / cumbersome.

The only way that would make sense is if beta testers don't have Twitter accounts, since OAuthing with an existing account reduces friction. Twitter's been around for four years and seems fairly well established among early adopters like HN readers, so counting on a critical mass of beta testers to have Twitter accounts hardly seems a stretch, even if those users aren't very active tweeters.

i for one was very glad not to need to enter an email address, pick a login name, etc; the oauth process handled that for me. ymmv

I think the suggestion was to not require a form of authentication (email or twitter) first. Instead, let the potential user "test drive" the app and then when they are a little invested prompt for a signup of some kind.

One-click registrations are really an innovative way to get people to sign up and try something. Normally you have to fill out an arduous form and decipher captchas. Services like facebook connect, twitter and Open ID Connect are much better from an UX standpoint(imho).

I was also pleasantly surprised when my login information was handled automatically as well.

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