Your article talks mainly about pagination of search results, but that's only one use case where many 'items' need to be shown to the user. Facebook and Twitter (as mentioned) use this, and it's certainly not a searching/filtering issue -- that's just the data requested by the user. Facebook I think have a very good approach by giving semantic meaning to their "pages" on the user timeline: you jump to "2009", rather than "page 5". Certainly, it isn't always as easy to group results meaningfully like this, but when possible it's a very good outcome for the user.