Great post from Roy Fielding:

The point is that you don’t need to change technologies (or even interaction styles) to solve a problem of information transfer efficiency. Sometimes you just need to rethink the problem. There are many systems for which a different architecture is far more efficient, just as XMPP is far more efficient than HTTP for something like group chat. Large-scale collaborative monitoring is not one of them.

I particularly like the 1kB image solution :-)