RFC 6455

There is a fair bit of chat going around regarding RFC 6455, better known as WebSockets, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455.  Wikipedia has already updated it's page to reflect the publication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket so there is little point going into to it too much and as such we'll just focus on the key connection upgrade differences.

Connection Upgrade
Sec-WebSocket-Key1 and Sec-WebSocket-Key2, two 8 byte random tokens used by the server to prove to the client it has read the client request, have been replaced with; Sec-WebSocket-Key, a single 16 byte random token which is now base64 encoded prior to sending.
The corresponding change from the server is that it now use that base64 string and concatenates the WebSocket GUID. I'm not sure where exactly this is defined tbh, it's not in the RFC linked to from this RFC - anyhoo, it's not that important where it is, but it is a constant - 258EAFA5-E914-47DA-95CA-C5AB0DC85B11. Wikipedia calls this a "magic string", there is nothing magic about it - it's just a SALT essentially. Now you have the concatenated string, you now need to hash it (current choice is SHA-1 a change in hashing from MD5), base 64 encode and reply to request with status code of 101 - Switching Protocols.