[decwakeboarder]

> Speaks protocol buffers, a fast and compact format compared to JSON

This is definitely important at Google-scale, but for the rest of us compressed JSON typically isn't that bad.

[euyyn]

If your users access your website from their phones, the latency and CPU benefits of proto become important for them.

[kybernetikos]

You should also test the speed. JSON.parse is surprisingly fast in modern browsers and binary access is surprisingly slow.

[krona]

Unless you're, you know, streaming anything other than UTF8.

[zepolen]

Last time I tried protocol buffers it was dog slow, json was pretty fast, and msgpack was insane fast. This was on a heavily nested dict of dicts structure.