I needed to pull the fan count for particular fan pages on Facebook. After digging through the API, I couldn't find a way to do this with the API "proper." Instead I fell back to a FQL query, and it worked quite well.
select fan_count from page where page_id = <FAN_PAGE_ID>
What did I miss about the Facebook API. Is this the only way to capture a fan count for a page? In general, how often do you use FQL for your requests as opposed to the exposed API methods?