[jonathanhefner]

I agree with most of the points regarding user experience. But I loathe infinite scrolling, and so strongly disagree that Facebook "got it right." I think "geared pagination" with a sprinkle of Ajax works well though, in lieu of infinite scrolling.

Here's an example, assuming there are 200 rows in total:

- User visits page; first 10 rows are listed.

- User clicks "More" link; next 20 rows are fetched via Ajax and appended to the list (30 total).

- User clicks "More" link again; next 30 rows are fetched via Ajax and appended to the list (60 total).

- User clicks "More" link again; browser navigates to the next 60 rows (rows #61-120).

- User clicks "More" link again; browser navigates to the next 60 rows (rows #121-180).

- User clicks "More" link again; browser navigates to the final 20 rows (rows #181-200).

The basic idea is that there are two typical use cases: 1) The user expects their desired row to appear in the first few dozen rows, and will change their query if it doesn't (as mentioned in the article). 2) Or, the user really does want to sift through all the rows, in which case it's preferable to do it in large steps.

Of course, the Ajax fetch increments can be tuned to best support these cases, as well as the number of Ajax fetches before triggering a full page transition.

I actually wrote a Rails gem that encapsulates this behavior, including robust handling of back-and-forth navigation: https://github.com/jonathanhefner/moar