We're really proud of what we've built here, and we're looking for beta testers to help us continue to scale Mantis. Filling in the holes of commodity WebRTC is going to bring some really fascinating face-to-face video apps to the market a lot sooner, and we're excited to have folks come into the playground we're building and play a bit.
If you're interested in using multiparty WebRTC, then please email me at melih@tokbox.com
Thanks! I'm one of the devs on the project; you can contact me directly at Zane@Streamified.com.
To your questions: one of the major benefits of the service is the "crowdsourced" aspect of it. That is: the more people using the same API, the more news articles get found and indexed. Furthermore, the API actually hooks into other paid APIs, so it actually wouldn't work very well for you to run it on your own servers unless you wanted to also pay for them. For all these reasons and more, we think that a hosted API is the best solution.
Apple missed on e-mail by making Mobile Me a paid service. This may be their way of making up for that, and having a solid foot hold in a consumer social network without that needing to be baked into their DNA.
Makes me wonder why Microsoft didn't turn its 2% of Facebook into a larger integration which both companies could have touted as value-added on both platforms.
If you're interested in using multiparty WebRTC, then please email me at melih@tokbox.com