I stumbled upon Humanized.com which seems to be a exploration project into creating a blog-like aggregator. The about page describes it as "Why couldn't reading an aggregator be as simple as reading a blog?".
What makes this project interesting to me is the lack of a paginator. Instead, when you reach the bottom of the page with the scroll bar, a message is displayed that alerts you; "More pages are being loaded..." and instantly more data is appended to the page.
Now this is thinking outside of the box. You get more to read when you need it, without thinking. Should this be the future of pagination or a lack there of? Maybe. I'm still contemplating that myself but I'm intrigued by the idea.
On Tuesday, Mar 18
Google Reader does something similar, loading new stories as you scroll through the reading frame.
A more discrete approach appears in many iPhone applications, where at the end of a list you get a link to load more items, which are then appended to the existing list.
I think this is a useful technique in some circumstances, but it can't be a catch-all replacement for pagination in general - I've got listings with hundreds of pages, and being able to jump to any one of them (without having to load all the intervening pages) is very valuable.
On Tuesday, Mar 18
I don't use Google reader so I did not know that. Thanks for that tidbit.
What I don't like about it is paging back up a long list. That's a little cumbersome. If it worked both ways it would be a little nicer.
I do like the iPhone approach.
On Tuesday, Mar 18
"Should this be the future of pagination or a lack there of?" NO.
This is idea's been around for awhile now. This useful when the info you show on page one is most relevant. However, it sucks when you want to arbitrarily skips to a page. It makes no sense to make user scroll when s/he wants to get to page 1000.
On Tuesday, Mar 18
I agree David, but let's think about this a little more. How could it be adapted to work for 1000 pages? I'm trying to think outside the box a litte but maybe it just doesn't work.
This concept works ok for the home page of a blog. I don't particularly find it useful for the aggregator example linked to above. But that's just due to the way I use aggregators. I want to see particular feeds first then work back to the less interesting ones. That being said, this model sucks for that.
On Tuesday, Mar 18
It is an interesting way of showing results for sure....I think it can work in some situations. I just wanted to give my friend Pete Forde props for posting this idea a couple years ago:
http://unspace.ca/discover/pageless/
;-)