It was inevitable that the term Comet would be affixed to an old, familiar web technology. I may make fun of the re-purposing of brands from under the sink, but I do think that Comet is an appropriate identifier. While event-capturing over HTTP/1.1 has been discussed in recent memory, Alex Russel's ETech presentation this coming Wednesday could get a lot of people talking about it. Again.

...and Eric, thanks for jogging my memory about streaming chat :)

References:
Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1: Persistent Connections
Comet: Low Latency Data for the Browser
HTTP Streaming - Ajax Patterns