Visitors will be far more likely to engage with a site if they don’t need to fill out separate registration forms.  And these visitors will increase the traffic to the site:  posting a comment to a site which uses Facebook Connect will allow that visitor’s entire Facebook network to see that activity, driving viral traffic back to the site.  Down the line, there will be opportunities for publishers to create deeper levels of engagement, using widgets and applications, that will offset the loss of control.

It is still early, but the services are evolving very quickly and the time to start paying attention is now.  AdAge published a good story this week in which David Berkowitz outlines some rules of thumbs.  For now, Google Friend Connect is the easiest to implement, but Facebook Connect of MySpaceID are more likely to let users bring a built-in network of friends.  Chris outlined some of the challenges in his Sunday in the Sandbox post.

The bottom line, however, is that networked registration systems will change the business model for publishers who have focused a lot of effort on building lead generation programs, so it’s time to think about some what if scenarios:

• what if a user was able to “friend” a sponsor through your site using Facebook Connect – and you were able to charge the sponsor for every new friend you connect them to?
• what if you were able to use Google Friend Connect to create networks of people interested in a given topic, and then invite them to attend sponsored webcasts or live events?
• what if Facebook or LinkedIn were to publish a feed of stories that your “connected” visitors are reading on their profile pages for all of their friends to see?

Let us know if you can think of any other cool “what if” scenarios that have the potential to change the business model for publishers and other registration-driven sites!

A lot of the buzz around these new services focus on their ability to connect your friends to products, services or entertainment outside the wall of the network in which you are connected; and for marketers to promote their products to other people in your entire network.  There are a few other important features to Facebook Connect that are worth noting, too, because they are designed to make it easier for users to connect with sites that are outside the Facebook wall.

When Mark Zuckerberg first described Facebook Connect in July at the company’s F8 conference, he outlined four key features:

1. Trusted Authentication: connecting your Facebook account with a partner site.  This would allow the partner site to read your profile and exchange information with it.
2. Real Identity:  the ability to take your Facebook identity to other sites, saving users the hassle of filling out multiple registration forms.
3. Friends Access:  staying connected with friends even outside of Facebook.  This has received the most buzz because it has marketers salivating over the idea of promoting products to the entire friend network of people who visit a partner site.
4. Dynamic Privacy: your Facebook privacy settings follow you to partner sites.

There is a fifth one up on the Facebook site:

5. Social Distribution: the ability to easily share content by posting it to your Facebook profile.

The key here is that Facebook Connect is designed to facilitate an interchange between the user and the partner site which, if it is well designed, can offer real benefits to the user. It’ll be fascinating to see how quickly media sites and marketers can find ways to use these services to connect with customers.  Would I be willing to “friend” my favorite ecommerce sites?  Sure – if it leads to relevant recommendations and offers, as opposed to more spam.

In the coming months, you’ll be hearing a lot of controversy and discussion around privacy issues (Facebook has gotten that one wrong before, after all), as well as continued debate about the merits of a proprietary service like Facebook Connect vs. the Open ID approach.  In the meantime, start thinking about what all of this might mean to how your company can engage with its customers.