A better way of browsing history

Browsing through history takes a lot of space and time on most social networks. Diaspora* is no exception.
To have an option for a collapsed view of history (more like e-mail) would greatly reduce both loading time and screen space when digging through the past.
Using scaling or color coded posts would show they're loved either by yourself or many others.
All a post mentions before expanding it would be a timestamp, poster's avatar and a title. The title being the start of the post that fits in this preview bar or all text until the first newline.
Every user should be able to set at what post-age this happens automatically in either minutes, hours, days, months or years. To toggle the collapse functionality there would be a button in the top bar.