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    <p>I have created such system and I took this approach:</p> <p>Database table with the following columns: id, userId, type, data, time.</p> <ul> <li><strong>userId</strong> is the user who generated the activity</li> <li><strong>type</strong> is the type of the activity (i.e. Wrote blog post, added photo, commented on user's photo)</li> <li><strong>data</strong> is a serialized object with meta-data for the activity where you can put in whatever you want</li> </ul> <p>This limits the searches/lookups, you can do in the feeds, to users, time and activity types, but in a facebook-type activity feed, this isn't really limiting. And with correct indices on the table the lookups are <em>fast</em>.</p> <p>With this design you would have to decide what metadata each type of event should require. For example a feed activity for a new photo could look something like this:</p> <pre><code>{id:1, userId:1, type:PHOTO, time:2008-10-15 12:00:00, data:{photoId:2089, photoName:A trip to the beach}} </code></pre> <p>You can see that, although the name of the photo most certainly is stored in some other table containing the photos, and I could retrieve the name from there, I will duplicate the name in the metadata field, because you don't want to do any joins on other database tables if you want speed. And in order to display, say 200, different events from 50 different users, you need speed.</p> <p>Then I have classes that extends a basic FeedActivity class for rendering the different types of activity entries. Grouping of events would be built in the rendering code as well, to keep away complexity from the database.</p>
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    1. POWhat's the best manner of implementing a social activity stream?
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    1. COthis is a really great system. I assume that you are creating the feed database entries at the same time you actually performing the action, for example, creating a new comment event entry in the feed table at the same time the user submits the comment
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    2. COYep, that's correct. Lately I've been using MongoDB (http://mongodb.org) in a few projects, whose schemaless approach makes it very suitable for creating a well performing social activity stream that follows this design.
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    3. COWait, but you have userID:1, you'll still need a join to grab the user name?
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