The Tripit example is already better, but better still would be to completely reconsider why somebody needs an account on your site in the first place to do stuff. You can offer a large part of your functionality —much larger than you would think— to anonymous users or users on temporary sessions. You only need to ask them for an e-mail address (let alone a confirmation) after they have gotten some value out of your site and it has become imperative for deeper engagement that you can reliably identify them in the future.

We did this because we wanted to remove every possible obstacle in the convert-action flow. Mind though, if you try to implement this, many engineers will give you “that’s impossible” because 1. it is far outside of normal paradigms 2. most frameworks’ session systems are not suitable for this.