I recently proposed to the Steemit team to add a feature to allow Steemian's to create accounts for their friends via Steemit. By coincidence, this feature was added shortly thereafter to http://busy.org and @timcliff made a post about it here:
https://steemit.com/news/@timcliff/new-tool-from-busy-org-create-new-steem-blockchain-accounts-with-steemconnect
Personally, I'm very excited about this feature because it seems like one of the best ways to validate users as "real people" for onboarding purposes. This method of account creation gets around the faucet abuse problems with previous methods, because the Steemian would actually have to make a gift of some Steem to their friend to create the account (with the faucet method, accounts were paid for by Steemit, and some people went so far as to fake their identities to get lots of accounts). I think people are already primarily brought to Steem by friends, and I don't think it's a great leap that people would be willing to buy or at least loan Steem to a friend to create an account for them.
Anyways, I'm mainly posting this to get other people's opinions on this. Would you create accounts for your friends this way? Or, have you used it already? If so, any comments on the experience? Do you think there should be a direct link on steemit.com to the account creation page?