There also is Thomas' pyext, which is written in flext an thus *might* run in Max as well. Then you could use all of python's networking modules, and there are a lot...
I'm sorry, pyext won't run with Max at this time because Max/MSP for OSX only wants CFM binary files as externals, but Python would only run with Mach-O. I also tried with OS9 a while ago (which was brute-force) but without success. Cycling tries to enable Mach-O binaries in the future and pyext has to wait for that
best greetings, Thomas