Overview
Unified User Actions (UUA) is a centralized, real-time stream of user actions on Twitter, consumed by various product, ML, and marketing teams. UUA reads client-side and server-side event streams that contain the user’s actions and generates a unified real-time user actions Kafka stream.The Kafka stream is replicated to multiple storage systems including HDFS, GCP Pubsub, GCP GCS, and GCP BigQuery for downstream consumption.
Action Types
UUA captures both public and implicit user actions:Public Actions
- Favorites: User likes on tweets
- Retweets: Sharing tweets to followers
- Replies: Direct responses to tweets
Implicit Actions
- Bookmarks: Saved tweets for later
- Impressions: Tweet views in timeline
- Video Views: Video playback events
Architecture Components
The UUA system is organized into four main components:Adapter
Transforms raw input events to UUA Thrift output format
Client
Kafka client utilities for stream consumption
Kafka
Specialized Kafka utilities including custom serialization/deserialization
Service
Deployment modules and service configuration
Data Flow
Integration Points
UUA serves as the foundational data layer for:Machine Learning
Machine Learning
ML models consume UUA events as training labels and real-time features for candidate retrieval and ranking.
Product Analytics
Product Analytics
Product teams track user engagement metrics and behavioral patterns.
Marketing
Marketing
Marketing teams leverage action data for campaign optimization and user segmentation.
Real-Time Processing
UUA is designed for real-time streaming with low latency requirements:- Events are processed as they occur
- Multiple downstream consumers can read from the same stream
- Replication ensures data availability across different platforms
- Unified schema provides consistency across all action types
Related Components
User Signal Service
Processes UUA data into standardized signals
Retrieval Signals
Uses UUA for candidate sourcing