I have a feeling it's deliberate that it's set at an excessively long poll interval (and quite possibly disabled altogether) for free accounts (it used to be that way on LJ too, at least back in the day).
Hmm, now you mention it I do remember checkfriends being a bit iffy when my LJ account was a free one. (Which it hasn't been for years – I got given a permanent account free of charge in gratitude for PuTTY – so my memory of free account behaviour is somewhat hazy.)
I must say I never really understood that policy on LJ, though. I think it's a mistake to pitch checkfriends / checkforupdates as a premium service provided for the benefit of the user paying for it; its purpose is to reduce load on the LJ/DW servers, so it's a feature provided for the benefit of the site administrators, and hence it surely should be more beneficial to the site admins the more users it's provided to. In particular, if I can't use checkforupdates at two-minute intervals, then the obvious alternative is not to wait ten hours between checks but to reload my actual friends page every two minutes, which is more CPU-intensive due to having to run the S2 and lay out all the HTML – so by denying any user a working checkforupdates they're increasing the load on their server.
Still, that's not your problem, of course. And I suspect I may end up getting a paid account anyway (I want a network page, notifications for my own comments, and comment editing – LJ's gift of a permanent account has apparently had the effect of getting me accustomed to those features, and hence making me want to give DW money :-), in which case it's not my problem either...
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Hmm, now you mention it I do remember checkfriends being a bit iffy when my LJ account was a free one. (Which it hasn't been for years – I got given a permanent account free of charge in gratitude for PuTTY – so my memory of free account behaviour is somewhat hazy.)
I must say I never really understood that policy on LJ, though. I think it's a mistake to pitch checkfriends / checkforupdates as a premium service provided for the benefit of the user paying for it; its purpose is to reduce load on the LJ/DW servers, so it's a feature provided for the benefit of the site administrators, and hence it surely should be more beneficial to the site admins the more users it's provided to. In particular, if I can't use checkforupdates at two-minute intervals, then the obvious alternative is not to wait ten hours between checks but to reload my actual friends page every two minutes, which is more CPU-intensive due to having to run the S2 and lay out all the HTML – so by denying any user a working checkforupdates they're increasing the load on their server.
Still, that's not your problem, of course. And I suspect I may end up getting a paid account anyway (I want a network page, notifications for my own comments, and comment editing – LJ's gift of a permanent account has apparently had the effect of getting me accustomed to those features, and hence making me want to give DW money :-), in which case it's not my problem either...