Quote from: cubemonkey on August 09, 2011, 02:46:44 AM

bitcoincharts streams it.. you save the stream to your local machine, then access that every 2 seconds.

The data from bitcoincharts are up to a couple of minutes delayed, whereas those from the Mt Gox websocket stream are generally only a couple of seconds old. There is no point in using the telnet stream from bitcoincharts unless one wants data from other exchanges than from Mt Gox, and even in that case it'll make more sense to use the websocket stream to obtain data from Mt Gox.

By saying that he wants to poll Mt Gox every 2 seconds, the OP has implicitly said that he wants the data as soon as possible. The websocket API, by pushing data as soon as they're available, obsoletes expensive polling.

Cheers,