Timeline Collection

This collection will merge and dedup social stream, it collects all things shared socially by you or TO you by someone else.

This table is the current support status, the D means cross-posts between the services are de-duplicated: when someone shares the same item across the two services, it will be merged into one item within this collection, including any responses like comments, likes, retweets, etc.

Service	Facebook	Twitter	Foursquare	Instagram
Facebook	comments, likes	D	D	D
Twitter	D	replies, RTs	D	D
Foursquare	D	D	(need synclet work to get comments)	D
Instagram	D	D	D	comments, hearts

Additional services that are planned to be supported, in order of priority (feel free to add to the list):

1. Tumblr
2. Google+ (waiting for their API to support things shared to you)
3. Path (waiting for an API at all)
4. Disqus (need connector work, could gather all replies to relevant posts in your feed)

Other possibilities:

• pinterest (is there much social sharing or cross-posting?)
• flickr (how many people follow others or use the social features, or cross-post from here?)
• wordpress (is the social following popular here?)
• youtube (the feeds from channels you subscribe to?)
• hackernews (what level of filtering? do the various twitter bots do good enough job here already?)

Implementation Notes

In order to dedup across all the services, various techniques are used. The most common is if any metadata is attached, such as with instagram usually the other services contain the exact same link. It also uses the text that is cross-posted, any links (after they’re unshortened even), and as a last resort will compare timestamps. The heuristics vary per-service and per-pairing and will need to evolve and improve over time.