Something is wrong with the styling of that page. In Chrome, Firefox and IE the first few paragraphs overlap some of the panels on the right, making it very unreadable.
I was at a startup in 94/95 where we made something a lot like protocol buffers, with a multi-platform, multi-language (Java / C++ / COM) API on top of it. Was very friendly -- very JSON-like -- and worked really well, up to tens of thousands of messages a second through then developer-class Pentium boxes.
I think you can still go fast without being nasty. Whether there is money in it is another question.
Another real-world example: SMTP vs QMTP (http://cr.yp.to/proto/qmtp.txt). IMHO, saving space by packing bits is not really so important anymore since nearly every link has high-bandwidth. Reducing latency by reducing round-trips is huge though.
Anything from completely brain-damaged (XER) over cheap (GSER or BER, depending on whether you want widely-used or human-readable) to nasty (PER) depending on what encoding rules you use.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Syntax_Notation_One