Someone with jQuery skills and WP AJAX knowledge should be able to whip this up in no time.
O.K. guys:
the coding-competition has just started on this feature 
I’m working on a solution to automatic refresh the activity stream on a buddypress website.
The easiest way would be to replace the existing activty stream through the new loaded html code. Unfortunately, the page flickers. Also if the user reply to an update, his text will disappear.
Okay, I only should add the new updates. So I’ve added a var “existing_ids” to my javascript and pass the IDs to my php script via AJAX. My php script return only the updates where the ID is not in the list.
This works fine. But still having the problems with replies/comments to existing posts. My current solution check, if the update has comments and also write them into a var “ids_with_comments”. My php script checks, if the ID does not exists yet on the page OR the ID is not in the var “ids_with_comments” AND now has comments. The JavaScript which handle the response checks, if this is an existing update, but with new comments. It will replace the update. Only if the user is currently replying to this update, the script will do nothing. So I prevent to override the textarea.
The current scripts a part of my theme. I’ve packed the files to Theme, which is using the bp-default templates. Here you can download the current version of my automatic-refresh theme.
http://www.spitzohr.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/automatic-refresh.zip
It’s not yet a finish solution…
Anyone ever develop a plugin or hack that does this?
live refreshing of the activity stream is on the roadmap (1.4)
https://buddypress.org/about/roadmap/
given that – i wrote a simple ajax notifier plugin https://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-activity-stream-ajax-notifier/ (short term solution)
Your plugin works a treat rich – thanks for sharing!
I think ajax refresh is THE thing that’s missing from BuddyPress at the moment. How does the P2 theme do it? Maybe we could “borrow” that functionality.
I wish I was a coder…
