It looks cool, but be very careful about using it (in a browser, at least). Browsers have super-fast JSON parsers and parsing msgpack is much, much slower than parsing good old JSON.
This great comment (from 201 days ago) is exactly about this issue:
JSON size: 386kb
MsgPack size: 332kb
Difference: -14%
Encoding with JSON.stringify 4 ms
Encoding with msgpack.pack 73 ms
Difference: 18.25x slower
Decoding with JSON.parse 4 ms
Decoding with msgpack.unpack 13 ms
Difference: 3.25x slower
MessagePack is not smaller than gzip'd JSON
MessagePack is not faster than JSON when a browser is involved
MessagePack is not human readable
MessagePack has issues with UTF-8
Small packets also have significant TCP/IP overhead
This great comment (from 201 days ago) is exactly about this issue:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4091051
I quote a bit of it here:
and also this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4093077