Ola! I know this s some kind of recurring topic for this mailing list. I know all the heat around it, but I think that Twitter's new strategy concerning their firehose is a good occasion to push them to implement the PubSubHubbub protocol.
Superfeedr makes RSS feeds realtime. We host hubs for several big publishers, including Tumblr, Posterous, HuffingtonPost, Gawker and several others. We want to make one for Twitter. Help us assessing the need and convince Twitter they need one (hosted by us or even them, if they'd rather go down that route) : http://bit.ly/hub4twitter Any comment/suggestion is more than welcome.