Go to http://www.meetup.com/Boston-Facebook-Developers/events/74788222/ to check on it and RSVP. On Twitter, #BostonFBDev

Let's network while eating some appetizers, listen to a talk, make announcements, demo apps, and network again!

Presentation #1: A Friend of a Friend

Annotating user-contributed content as from "a friend of a friend" offers many more opportunities to de-anonymize content than using only the first-degree friend network.  We'll talk about how we accomplished this using a combination of on-demand friend data and offline processing with Hadoop/Hive.

Presentation #2: Get Personal!

Personalization is one of the top buzzwords for 2012. But it’s not without merit. Indeed, building a personal experience on the web can improve user retention, reduce bounce rates and (in an ideal world) even improve commerce. But it’s tough to balance the traditional approach to user-generated content with the hard math of personalization.

As you probably know, sites that generate or curate content from users rely on having a small number of producers feeding a huge set of consumers. When you cross into the world of personalization, most sites filter down their content to that produced by a friend. The problem is that not many people create—ever. And typically, people only have 150 to 300 friends. If your friends don’t create content, the personalized experience can be very, very lonely.

Sanjay Vakil will share a case study on how TripAdvisor has tackled this problem with a “Personalization Pyramid” and created a better custom experience for its users.