A more apt comparison is the "new twitter" homepage. If you load it and keep an eye on your Ajax requests, you'll see something like this: http://cl.ly/b043f31

A more apt comparison is the "new twitter" homepage. If you load it and keep an eye on your Ajax requests, you'll see something like this: http://cl.ly/b043f31cd91dfdac8918 http://cl.ly/b043f31cd91dfdac8918 There, Recommendations, Friends, Followers, and Memberships are the models, and render off the contents of that JSON. Of course, Twitter should really be bootstrapping all of those bits of JSON into the initial page load, instead of firing off six requests immediately...