As much as I want to applaud your progress here, as a user I want transactional stuff to stay in my email inbox. My iMessage is already starting to become overwhelming from spam and apps — I want fewer messages not more.
Haha yeah, well. User account growth is indeed slowing and is down to 1% the last couple of weeks. I thought that was obvious from looking at the graph but I'll clarify it in the article. Recorded minutes are growingly steadily though and are still increasing with about 5% week over week.
Meteor.com is using NodeJS as a backend, but the idea is to not separate these two components. So Meteor spans both and you can write stuff designated for the client and the server side in the same file. In practice we rarely do, but both sides run the same code. Check it out!
Yes. It makes for a much more fluid experience (at least if you have JS ;)), similar to that of a desktop app. The web was originally built to be a set of individual pages but that's not how we want things to behave today. Building a UI with Meteor.com where the JS controls all the interaction, page switching, event handling and automatic data updates is sooo much simpler than requiring a full page refresh or using AJAX to modify individual components. If the DOM is built up by JS in the first place, it makes it very simple to change it by JS. Read more about Meteor's philosophy in the first paragraphs of their docs, here: http://docs.meteor.com/
The downside is that if you don't have JS, you can't do much. In our case it was a price we decided to pay.