jQuery Lifestream Plug-in
At first I decided to load all the feeds at the end of all the asynchronous requests. This only required one DOM request at the end. The problem with that approach is that it just takes too long to load. Some requests timed-out and others just took a while.


It's unclear to me why the requests are timing out, but you could simply store the results of the responses in memory as opposed to what you might be doing; synchronization logic is not necessary, you only need to know when all requests ended. However, the downside of this approach is that time outs can make your application show nothing to your visitors, which is something you really don't want to do...


  What I'm doing right now is changing the DOM after each feed request (e.g. twitter). At the moment this means 8 DOM changes.


It feels to me that 8 DOM changes are trivial to do by your browser; but the thing to do here is to actually figure out how many requests your code needs to be capable of handling.

A bad option would be to update the DOM on each X-th response, because you are introducing the timed-out problem again. So, a better option is adding your responses to a queue and updating the DOM each X ms. That way you have the best of both worlds, and it doesn't matter how much feeds you'll be adding because it scales pretty well. There might probably be other problems at the high end, like updating too much DOM at once, but that's out of the question here...