Is Google's Protocol Buffers used in large scale production applications?

Is Google's Protocol Buffers used in large scale production applications in production?

What is the experience using it?

Does Google use protobuf?

Protocol buffers, or Protobuf, is a binary format created by Google to serialize data between different services. Google made this protocol open source and now it provides support, out of the box, to the most common languages, like JavaScript, Java, C#, Ruby and others.

How do Google Protocol Buffers work?

Protocol buffers provide a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data in a forward-compatible and backward-compatible way. It's like JSON, except it's smaller and faster, and it generates native language bindings.

BTW Apache ActiveMQ 6 will probably be using Protocol Buffers as its default marshalling layer. Early experiences are very favourable; as its easy to have each endpoint on different versions and yet still be able to parse the binary protocol - plus it seems very fast. A great alternative to JSON/XML when you need a performance boost