You nailed why we're using Facebook connect, without it the site is very empty, since we can't automatically pull events in. We need to communicate that better.
You could connect with other websites where you can input each birtday date to remember, etc.
A lot of friends are putting fake birthday dates just to check if people remember their real date and I didn't even put mine (or at least it is not displayed) but I have a google doc storing every birthday I want to remember. And no I don't want to wish happy birthday to everyone in my FB list, nor see "do you want to send a gift to XXX" and feel guilty about it.
TLDR : add the possibility to give dates/names/mail in the site instead of just facebook scraping.
TLDR : add the possibility to give dates/names/mail in the site instead of just facebook scraping.