We want to implement a "News feed" where a user can see messages broadcasted by her friends, sorted with newest message first. But the feed should reflect changes in her friends list. (If she adds new friends, messages from those should be included in the feed, and if she removes friends their messages should not be included.) If we use the pubsub-test example and attach a recipient list to each message this means a lot of manipulation of the message recipients lists when users connect and disconnect friends.

We first modeled publish-subscribe "fan out" using conventional RDBMS thinking. It seemed to work at first, but then, since the IN operator works the way it does, we quickly realized we couldn't continue on that path. We found Brett Slatkin's presentation from last years Google I/O and we have now watched it a few times but it isn't clear to us how to do it with "dynamic" recipient lists.

What we need are some hints on how to "think" when modeling this.