[ryandrake]

I think this is one of those many cases where how the technology works doesn't match the actual meaning of the English word, but for whatever reason the word has stuck.

For better or worse, a lot of things on the Internet now assume that only "servers" can accept incoming connections, and therefore anything that needs to be "sent" to clients needs to be done by making the client poll a server over and over. True P2P apps (with no intermediary server) are pretty rare now, for a variety of reasons: some good reasons, some stupid reasons.