BuddyPress.org

>>Just because Facebook does something a particular way doesn’t make it a best practise

– true, but you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll have done some serious multi-variate testing on the conversion rates of that sign-up form.

There are plenty of arguments on both sides, but as part of a full usability overhaul I’m falling more on the side of fewer fields.

This jquery plugin looks like it could be a good usability enhancement too:
http://www.unwrongest.com/projects/show-password/

Thanks for pointing me towards bp-xtra-signup plugin, it looks great (though I’m getting JS errors in IE6 and IE7 when using the ajax auto-checkers…)