I primarily use Django/Django Rest Framework as the back end so web-sockets are a pain right now. I'm looking forward to when Andrew Godwin's channel work gets into Django proper where socket.io would make a lot of sense. Unless I'm missing something and socket.io does ajax requests these days? I haven't used it in quite some time.

Have you looked into using something like Pushpin with Django? http://pushpin.org/about/