Depends on the scenario. If you're working in a closed environment with only a few consumers of your service, you could switch to a COMET style service which allows a callback from the service to the client. More about that here:
Wikipedia - COMET
From what I've read, that method doesn't scale well in larger environments so I'd be careful.
The more traditional method is your first option of polling the service for changes. As long as your service performs well and you have the appropriate hardware to serve up the requests, it's probably your best bet for a public facing web service.