For the last month or so, Flickr have been starting to roll out their new "justified" view across the site. It's very pretty, and generally I'm a fan, but as well as the possible criticism of the reliance on JavaScript,¹ it's meant that the easy access to page numbering on the old views has been lost. An off-the-cuff (and admittedly somewhat snarky) remark on Twitter prompted Nolan Caudill to write a well-thought-out post about pagination.
In it, he agreed with my point about infinite scrolling:
Infinite scrolling is basically a pretty representation of the 'next' link that you 'click' by scrolling to the bottom of a page. I'll leave whether or not it's good user experience to others, but as a purely visual experience, I like it. If it's the only source of pagination, that sucks, and another navigation scheme should be provided if having your users be able to look through the list or find something is important.
but he also made a very good point about the failings of traditional "n per page" links:
Pagination should provide accurate navigation points that reflect the overall ordering of the stream, and pagination based around fixed-length pages provide nothing more than arbitrary access into this ordering, where we have to use estimation and instinct about the distribution of the content in order to make a guess of where a link will send us
He goes on to suggest time-based navigation, somewhat like the letter tabs often found in dictionaries. In fact, many sites already implement their APIs this way- Flickr included. Twitter makes copious use of max_id (and this is well-explained in their documentation), while Instagram use max_timestamp and min_timestamp. There are places in the Flickr API that can use min_timestamp and max_timestamp, although there are also traditional page parameters in that call.
It's not just APIs, though. Tumblr's archives are infinite-scroll, but with a month selector so you can skip back and forth through time. (That's on the desktop web, anyway: for some reason the iPad version omits the form.) It's not perfect - if you post hundreds (or thousands) of entries in a month, it's hard to pick them out - but for most users, it works fairly well.
Of course, having said all this, I should really implement something that mixes the visual niceness of justified view with the navigational panache of a timeline. One thought I did have is that a small (sparkline-style?) bar graph of posts over time, although computationally expensive across large archives, would definitely help to highlight busy points to look at (or, depending on whether your friends upload too many photos from trips, avoid). Definitely something to consider playing with.
¹ Oops: I didn't test this, but Stephen Woods correctly pointed out that JavaScript is only used to delay loading and extend the number of photos shown, and that the page works fine with JS disabled. ↩