Facebook Connect and the Facebook Connect module for Drupal - A Case Overview

In addition to Geeks and God, another one of my favorite podcasts is Leo Laporte's Tech Guy podcast and Leo's net@night podcast with with Amber McArthur. In a recent episode Facebook connect came up.
From what I gathered Facebook Connect is an application/tool that acts very similarly to LiveID in that users can use their Facebook login to log into and create instant profiles on other websites.
The Facebook Connect Drupal Module
Sounded pretty cool. I thought wouldn't it be cool if there were a Drupal module customized to integrate Facebook Connect with Drupal sites. So I made one (kidding). There is in fact a module called Facebook Connect for Drupal 6.x that is current in beta.

This module allows users to login on a Drupal website through the Facebook Connect API – using their Facebook login and password.
The module also brings other extra features:

• After logging through Facebook Connect, users can create a local Drupal account
• Users can choose which of their Facebook public information they want to import and synchronize with their Drupal local account, following Facebook Connect API Terms of use
• Users can see which of their Facebook friends already have an account on the Drupal website
• Users can publish a customizable message on their Facebook feed announcing that they have created an account on the Drupal website
• Users can invite their Facebook friends to create an account on the Drupal website

Installation and Testing
Being the adventurous sole that I am I decided to give it a spin on my ShoeMadam.com website.
The result? Not bad.
The installation steps are pretty clear in the readme.txt file however in step #2 you need to copy all the contents of the "facebook-platform/php" folder into the facebook-client folder AS IS. Note that it is the contents of the "facebook-platform/php" folder not the folder itself. This will be more clear when you walk through the installation steps. I have asked the developer to make this more clear.
There does seem to be a possible conflict with the existing user_relationships module I have installed, as it returns a brief error message (that then mysteriously disappears; cross your fingers for me).
One nice feature is that is is VERY easy to invite Facebook contacts to become users of the Drupal site! Very very cool.
 
User Profiles
When a Facebook user creates their account they can choose which fields and information they want pulled over from their Facebook account (they can select from a list that you authorize in the fbconnect module settings).
After a couple of test I disabled all the Facebook pull-over field because as far as I can tell a moderate level user like myself would not be able to easily use that data via CCK and Views. So for the time being I chose to have all the user profile data be gathered within Drupal.
One cool thing is that it pulls over the Facebook avatar of the user as their user profiile picture. I have avatar blocks installed and it display them well (though a bit fuzzy).
 
Room for Improvement
As it is set up now if a user logs out of the Drupal site they are also logged out of their Facebook account and visa versa. This is sort of a pain but that mostly because I'm usually swtiching back and forth between a couple of user accounts.
There is also much to be learned on the Facebook application development side (by me or whom ever wants to use this module). It's not rocket science but is a nice little project.
Final Thoughts
As Facebook grows and grows this module could be very very useful by drupal sites. As of this writing there are only 9 site reporting use of this module, I'm sure that will increase with time as it is a pretty simple install and process and doesn't require too much code knowledge to pull off.
The other thing to consider is that a module like this puts part of the funcationality of your site not only at the mercy of the module developer but also with Facebook itself and any changes it may make that might cause your application/Drupal Facebook Connect module to to break. But even if that happens the accounts that are created are still on your Drupal site even if the connect function becomes disabled. So I would guess.