A socket is a your delivery man .
You give him a message (data), he delivers it to your target for you .
With UDP (urban delivery), you're using postal mail, and it can get lost and you won't know about it.
With TCP, its typical company stuff. You pay more (higher latency and lower throughput), but you're guaranteed that the message is delivered, or, if the delivery man is killed on the way, you're told about it.
Only one recipient (listener) per socket, but many people from the same house (computer) can send from it.
And yeah, that's pretty much all sockets are.