[andybak]

The most significant loss is the ability to keep your place. Google Reader is a good example. There's no way to bookmark how far back you've read so when I reload or close the tab I usually have give up and abandon unread items.

You could mitigate this but it would be useful to see what benefits people think infinite scrolling introduces and (if there are any) see if there is a solution that gives the same benefits with fewer costs.

Maybe some hybrid 'paged' infinite scrolling where you can keep going but clear pagebreaks are displayed which are mirrored in the browser history.

[jqueryin]

I have actually recently implemented something just like this where I use a combination of infinite scroll, pagination, pushState, and history to maintain your page reference. It uses Ember.js, so it even updates the pagination count for you as you scroll through the table. The infinite scroll is toggleable and you can decide to just stick with the "prev/next" pagination items as well.

Unfortunately, I had to custom roll this solution. I started on a plugin but making it universally usable for a number of use-cases is a bit time consuming.

[itmag]

The Danish dating site dating.dk uses a hybrid format with both page numbers and infinite scrolling (if I remember correctly). It's a site with a huge member base (considering the population of the country) so it seems to work well in the real world.