Sources and Channels — How Picasi Collects Data
Two Levels: Source and Channel
If you want to monitor a company in Picasi, you need two levels:
A source is the company or organization itself—for example, Muster Inc. The source represents who you are monitoring.
A channel is the specific platform on which the company is active—the LinkedIn account, the YouTube channel, the website’s RSS feed. A channel represents where you are monitoring them.
A source can have multiple channels, and that’s the norm. Muster AG might be active on LinkedIn and YouTube and run a blog with an RSS feed. In Picasi, it would then have three channels.
Why this distinction?
This distinction allows you to filter updates in your inbox by platform. If you only want to know what Muster AG has posted on LinkedIn, you can set the channel type filter to LinkedIn in your inbox.
You can also disable individual channels without deleting the entire source. If Muster AG’s YouTube channel no longer produces relevant content, you can disable it—LinkedIn and RSS will continue to work.
Channel Discovery
When you create a new source using its website URL, Picasi automatically tries to find the associated channels. This happens in three steps:
First, Picasi analyzes the website and searches for visibly linked channels—most company websites contain links to LinkedIn, YouTube, and other platforms. It also recognizes LinkedIn Showcase pages, country-specific Facebook pages, and YouTube URLs with path suffixes such as /videos.
If that’s not enough, the AI uses its knowledge of the company to estimate likely channel URLs.
As a final step, an email address is always created. You can use this to manually subscribe to newsletters—the content will then land directly in your inbox.
Add Channels Manually
Automatic discovery doesn’t always find all channels. If you know that a company has a LinkedIn account that Picasi didn’t find, you can add the channel manually—using the direct profile URL.
This is often necessary for LinkedIn personal profiles, as websites often don’t link to them directly.
Retrieval Frequency
How often a channel is retrieved depends on the channel type:
RSS feeds and YouTube are checked every 15 minutes. LinkedIn runs on a separate service with its own schedule. Newsletters arrive immediately in your email inbox, without polling.
This means: Depending on the schedule, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours between a LinkedIn post by Muster AG and its appearance in your inbox.