Explaining fat pings in cloud pipe

Long polling is a technique used by Dave to receive real-time updates from websites that support RSS cloud or Pub/Sub/Hubbub protocols, despite being behind a firewall that prevents direct access. Instead of just getting the URL of the updated feed, he also receives the actual content of the updated item. This “fat ping” approach reduces the number of feed reads required on the server side, which is beneficial for sites with a lot of user-generated content.