Sources and Channels — How Picasi Collects Data
Two Levels: Source and Channel
If you want to follow a company in Picasi, there are two levels to consider:
A source is the company or organization itself—for example, Muster AG. The source represents who you’re following.
A channel is the specific platform where the company is active—its LinkedIn account, YouTube channel, or website’s RSS feed. A channel represents where you’re following it.
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 makes it possible to filter updates in the inbox by platform. If you only want to know what Muster AG has posted on LinkedIn, you can set the channel type filter in the inbox to LinkedIn.
You can also disable individual channels without deleting the entire source. If Muster AG’s YouTube channel is no longer producing relevant content, you can disable it—while LinkedIn and RSS will continue to function.
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 go directly to your inbox.
Adding 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, since websites frequently don’t link to them directly.
Retrieval Frequency
How often a channel is checked 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 inbox via email, without polling.
This means that, depending on the schedule, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours for a LinkedIn post from Muster AG to appear in your inbox.