Socket.io is a library that enables real-time and full-duplex communication between web clients and servers. It uses mechanisms like WebSockets, polling, and flash sockets for browser compatibility. Socket.io provides features like fallback options for cross-browser compatibility, rooms for broadcasting to subsets of connected clients, namespaces for handling different event namespaces, and authentication of connections. It can be configured to use different transport mechanisms and authenticate connections using handshake data including request headers, date, address, domain, security, and more.