Why didn't you implement a url to call for ping one feed ?
I'm thinking something like feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSu...<blog-url>) so you can stop polling feeds to get update but you'll be pinged when there are updates.
Polling feeds works very well most of the time, but there's probably a lot of bandwidth being wasted. Why not combine polling with a ping service where twitterfeed is notified of updates?
And how about a "force refesh" or "manual ping" button? That could be useful too.