Twitter Testing AJAX Updates?

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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