What about Socket.io? Heroku points to this announcement and it looks like the sort of thing that could function similar to Websockets.
(I just started with Node so please forgive any glaring ignorance I display.)
(I just started with Node so please forgive any glaring ignorance I display.)
However Websockets is a significantly more efficient, standards-oriented approach. There is a large class of apps that would be really awesome (webkit browsers, websockets + node) that will not be hostable with Heroku. In my personal opinion, these would be really awesome apps.