What you are describing is moving from a polling model to a publish/subscribe model (which as you can appreciate is a much better way to do chats/feeds than polling). Two possible resources are this article Publish/Subscribe design pattern implementation in C and this previous stack overflow question about Pub/Sub architecture .
I'll stay away from commenting on different methods of implementing your application and concentrate on answering the question you asked - you can accomplish this using Query Notifications. There is a lot you can do with these, but the basic premise is that once you have set this up, you give SQL server a query you are interested in, and it will notify your application when the results change.
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