Twitter Testing AJAX Updates?

Posted by Kristen Nicole on February 11th, 2009 11:25 AM

In the past hour or so we’ve noticed an increase in the number of Twitter users that are seeing AJAX update refreshes on their Twitter home pages. Is Twitter experimenting with AJAX for tweet updates?

I haven’t witnessed it myself but the Web Distortion blog has grabbed a screen shot of the new option; at the bottom of the profile page the “Older” button has been replaced with “More.” Clicking on “more” will load new tweets on top of the old ones, without refreshing the entire page.

The “more” button’s sporadic appearances lead us to believe that Twitter is still in the testing phases for a new AJAX feature, which would be quite helpful for a number of users that stick to the main website for the bulk of their Twitter activity. It would also be a rather big update for Twitter, which has remained a largely basic and unchanged service since its launch.

It’s been the third party developers that often create valuable added features such as AJAX updates, but perhaps the infringing competition from Facebook is encouraging Twitter to push out more features on its own, especially if they’ll enhance the user experience directly on Twitter’s website.

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Twitter Applications 3 months ago 1 point
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Twitter originally had AJAX loading for updates but the feature was removed early on as a means to reduce load on the service. It will certainly be a welcome feature to have again, I wonder though if the frequency of call required for AJAX calls will be acceptable for use by apps using the API? It's kind of like the difference between using push email and regular pop email!

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Javier Rios 1 year ago 1 point
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From what I have seen yes, in the past two weeks maybe a little less they have been. It has been updating your tweets as well as having a more button at the bottom that is ajax driven and pulls latest tweets.

I hope it is something they do as I have liked it when on the main page. But I have been using twitterfox as of recent and love it.

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1 /people/facebook-209700245/ /people/facebook-209700245/following/

Marshall Kirkpatrick 1 year ago 1 point
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I've been using the Autopagerize greasemonkey script for some time and that basically provides same functionality on twitter and most other pages. You might like it too.

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http://readwriteweb.com