I have mixed feelings about Facebook Connect, but let’s talk about the pros first.
In case you haven’t heard, Facebook officially released their Connect feature this week and it allows any external site to take advantage of FB’s authentication system and full API. This was only possible through FB applications in the past but now you can open up your own site to over 120 million active FB users. They can log in without having to go through a registration process and you will be able to pull-in almost every information available on their FB account such as email address, avatar, status message, photos and a list of all their friends.
The potentials are obvious. But how easy/hard is it to apply this to an existing application on your site and how useful is it to the museum community? So I got my hands dirty and dug straight into the documentation. I used an existing framework (Symfony) that I have used to develop a collections application. The challenge was to first integrate Facebook Connect on top of Symfony’s own authentication system and the second challenge was to use FB’s API to extract information that I can use on a museum collection website.
And voila! it took 10 mins to set up the authentication system and another 20 mins to do the rest. FB Connect is ridiculously easy to implement and once you’re authenticated, you can use their PHP classes to make calls to their API and get virtually any information you want about the user.
Here’s my information on a museum collections site after I have been authenticated
The possibilities are endless. You have the user’s email address, so for example, if they wanted to purchase an image, you could take them through an e-commerce system or do something fun like let them add the object as a favourite and publish the image and object details on their Facebook profile or update their status automatically.
What makes me uncomfortable about FB Connect is that you are depending on a single site. It’s not like OpenId and it’s hard to know whether FB will be relevant in 5 years time. So it may be best to keep your own sign-up process and add FB on top as a feature.
The other factor that makes me worry is that you don’t even have to go to Facebook to log in, unlike OpenId. You are presented with a DHTML login window directly on your own site. So what’s stopping people from making a bogus login window and storing your login details? Surely I’ve missed something there.
But over all, I have to admit I am really impressed 
Update:
From FB’s official press release:
Over 100 Websites implemented Facebook Connect during the testing period or are set to release in the coming weeks. Examples include: Citysearch, CNET and TheInsider.com by CBS Interactive, CNN.com/Forum, ConnectedWeddings, Gawker, Global Grind, Govit, Howcast, IndieGoGo, Inside Facebook, Joost, MoveOn, MyBarackObama, Newsbrane, Red Bull, SGN iFun, SFGate, TechCrunch, TripAdvisor, Yammer, Vimeo, vLane, and Xobni; alumni associations at Oklahoma State University, University of Toronto, Oregon State, and Ithaca College; as well as services and plug-ins from Force.com, iModules, Pluck SiteLife, and Six Apart.