Building Timeline: Scaling up to hold your life story

This post details the engineering effort behind Facebook's Timeline feature, highlighting the challenges and solutions for scaling to store and present years of user activity. It describes the denormalization of data for efficient ranking, the development of a Timeline aggregator built on Multifeed, and a highly parallelized development process that started as a hackathon project. It showcases the application of core Facebook technologies (MySQL, Multifeed, Thrift, memcached) to a complex data aggregation and presentation problem.