What gets me is it's 2012 and we still have to keep solving account management over and over. It's a big bucket of word dealing with multiple signup methods, resetting passwords, profile pictures, etc.
I wish there were an open source project that unified best practices (in various tech stacks).
Open ID tried and failed. What I see now is more developers creating their own registration auth. Even if they lose on signup conversions vs. 1-click Fb or Twitter, they avoid duplicate account mixups.
Most of the discussions on HN surrounding privacy and FB usually have several mentions of a creation of a 2nd acct (as you've seen), but also mention Mozilla's BrowserID project: https://browserid.org/
Having to deal with registration and account management is a choice, not a necessity. From bugmenot to mytrashmail, examples of websites not having to solve account management are numerous.
The registration is often a barrier preventing people from using your service, and it's not even mandatory to have user management [1].
I wish there were an open source project that unified best practices (in various tech stacks).