There's nothing wrong with using HTTP if it's done in a sensible way.

In the early days of the realtime web, long-polling was used mostly as an underlying hack in the emulation of streams. However, RealCrowd's API isn't a hack. When clients make requests to the server, they are attempting to synchronize a resource. One could argue that this kind of interface is semantically closer to what the client is trying to accomplish than one based around pure message passing.