The blog post explaining the entire thing is awesome.

http://www.pubnub.com/blog/stackhack

I got a disconnection message after a few seconds and had to reconnect, but i'ts a cool demo.

I started building (and am still working on) something similar in spirit back in August: a real-time collaborative game-making tool (http://craftstud.io/). I started it as a Web app using SocketStream but I ended up switching to a downloadable native app for multiple reasons:

- building a complex Web-based app UI is daunting and the result is often slow or doesn't feel very native. I hope the upcoming Web Components / Shadow DOM specs will help fix this (http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw-file/tip/spec/shadow...). Basically they will allow proper widget encapulsation.

- WebSockets force a centralized approach (costs go up) and are TCP-based which make them jerky for a lot of real-time use cases. (WebRTC will probably fix some of this too)

I described in more details why & how I switched in this post: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=22939.msg652055#...

Apologies for the repeated disconnects. It's a result of the authoritative server restarting. Working on a fix, but it's tricky without dropping that aspect completely.

WHO MADE the unicorn on http://stackhack.com ? get in touch - we want to hire you. hello@pubnub.com

Very cool. But I seem to lose connection to the server when the server-side wipe happens sometimes.