One of the most commonly seen Facebook widget on 3rd party publisher sites (i.e. outside of the Facebook at say latimes.com) is the Like button. In its simplest form, when a user clicks on the Like button, an update is posted to the user's newsfeed (something like "Jane liked this article") along with a link to the article. In this mode of operation, the user benefits by being able to re-use their Facebook session (or alternatively their Facebook user id and password) and gets an opportunity to conveniently express themselves via their Facebook newsfeed. The 3rd party publisher site benefits as the Facebook newsfeed eventually leads to referral traffic (friends of the original user who see the article in the newsfeed and click on it). And Facebook benefits by increasing its leverage as the reservoir of referral traffic. With this simple Like widget, the publisher doesn't know anything about the end user - all that it knows is somebody clicked on the article.
Facebook has also created more advanced widgets that are used by a much smaller number of publishers. These widgets make some of a user's Facebook data (such as their friends list) available to the publishers. To use the advanced widget, a user needs to sign-in to the publisher web-site with their Facebook ID and password (or link their user ID and password on the publisher site with their Facebook ID) and authorize the exchange of their data between Facebook and the publisher site. Subsequently, the user can see which of their friends liked/recommended/shared a particular article, right on the publisher web-site, giving the publisher web-site a stronger social flavor than the simple Like button (*).
One can imagine Facebook creating other advanced widgets that allow transactions (perhaps using Facebook credits) right from the publisher's website. What's more such an advanced widget could tell a user which of their friends have bought the same item and encourage the user to confer with these friends to increase confidence in the purchase. Creepy since people are not (yet) used to such suggestions from a web-site, but potentially very effective for the publisher.
(*) In principle, Facebook can surface some of the stronger social flavor without exposing user information to the publisher. But it is not hard to imagine cases where without collaborating with the publisher, surfacing interesting social flavors is either too inefficient or impossible. One such example is "suggested links" based on what a user's friends have read on the publisher site (but not shared/liked/recommended)
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