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Facebook Timeline is audacious in scope. It wants to compile a complete scrollable version of your life story from photos, locations, videos, status updates, and everything you do. That could be many decades of data (hopefully) that must stored and made quickly available at any point in time. A huge technical challenge, even for Facebook, which we know are experts in handing big data. And they built it all in 6 months.
Facebook's Ryan Mack shares quite a bit of Timeline's own implementation story in his excellent article: Building Timeline: Scaling up to hold your life story.
Five big takeaways from the article are:
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