Disclaimer I am one the co-founders: I suggest you to have a look at Stream . Stream allows you to create scalable newsfeeds and activity streams without worrying about infrastructure. The integration is also very simple because there are official clients for the most common programming languages and web frameworks. At Stream we use a mixed approach between Fan-out on writes and pull on read. You can also find lot interesting articles about this linked here that's were we started when we build Stream-Framework the largest open-source solution to build scalable newsfeeds (written in Python with Redis and Cassandra as backends).

Hi, Disclaimer: I am the CTO of GetStream.io Implementing what you describe is fairly simple indeed. First of all sign up on getstream.io and go to the dashboard. You will have an app with 4 different kind of feeds already configured. Install the javascript client (https://github.com/getstream/stream-js) Add the client to your project and configure it with the API keys you find on GetStream Dashboard When an activity needs to trigger a notification (eg. it contains a mention to a user) make sure that you use the to field. eg ({'actor': 'user:tom', 'verb': 'comment', 'object': 'nice work @john', to: ['notification:john']}) Subscribe for notification updates, see this example When you want to set the notification feed as read or seen (and reset the counters to 0) just perform an API get and send the mark seen/mark read parameters We built a very simple example app with NodeJS and Mongoose , here you can find the interesting bits about the realtime UI code and here is how the main html page looks like. I hope this helps, if not feel free to ping me at tommaso@getstream.io ;) Best, Tommaso