The thing that really gets me with all this real-time hype is people attribute the rise of Twitter to all the awesome desktop clients built for it so you can receive your tweets in real-time, the problem is they aren't actually real-time, all those desktop clients use polling, just with a really short interval.

If you really wanted your desktop RSS reader to be just as awesome and real-time as Twhirl then just set all the feed refresh intervals to 5 minutes, no RSSCloud needed.