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For me though, no thanks... sounds like it's the widget for those with short attention spans or large groups of superficial friends, neither of which applies to me.
Could there possibly be a business usecase for this though? Could companies use it for tech support communication? That would definitely fit in more with Stikam's corporate approach (the PR releases, "consumers", etc...). But I suppose that wouldn't work because then companies would actually have to have real people doing their tech support instead of the oh-so-helpful chatbots that you usually encounter.
I told them their site was crap and needed more polish and that they should try bugging the people that Mike Arrington reads instead of Z-listers like myself. :-P
But you are right, this can actually take off in unknown ways with the teen population globally.
Another interesting thing might be to watch your office/home remotely while you are away. I can see this to be a simple solution that might be easy to use. How about my friend using this to watch his 6-month old baby upstairs while he's busy cooking dinner downstairs - in addition to the monitor that he uses. It might be a cool application which is simple and easy to use.
About them having a PR guy does sound strange, especially when the target market may be the younger crowd mainly.
Yep, that's true.
There are so many audio & video service providers out there now that the technical babylon I'm swimming in is making me feel dizzy. There's Skype for audio; however there head and shoulders over most would-be competitors in ease of use and audio quality. There's Yahoo's audio & video offerings. MSN (Microsoft) audio and video offerings, and several more. What the heck?
New blog format is great, I agree.
And regarding Robert O (above) with all his questions: why don't you actually TRY a product before ripping it apart? And you also appear to be confused regarding MSN/Yahoo audio & video. Does Yahoo/MSN let you embed live video in a webpage? Not that I'm aware. And re: swimming in technical babylon -- this is TECHNOLOGY we are talking about. Are you expecting a magical standard just to be lifted up and heralded as "the one" and then everyone will suddenly switch to it? That's not how it works. Look at DVD-HD vs. Bluray. Look at VHS vs. Beta. Look at Token Ring vs. Ethernet. Look at the 3 different wi-fi "standards" before 802.11a/b/g. Look at DVD's -- DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, 4.7GB or 9GB etc etc. I could go on.
Also, the world is not *just* America. Japan for example would be a massive market for a Stickam kind of product. 45Mbps data lines to the house are very very common. They love simple, wacky things like this. I would not be surprised if it goes like gangbusters in Japan/Korea.
Anyway. Sorry for the rant. I just get pissed when someone says something like:
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About them having a PR guy does sound strange, especially when the target market may be the younger crowd mainly.
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No offense intended Vaibhav, but you obviously have *no idea* how a company launches products. Do you think that "buzz" just magically happens? Do you think people just magically "discover" a website? Believe me, that ain't how it happens.
Pete -- a dotcom/startup veteran who has had just about enough of dotcom/startups for his lifetime.
That translates to a worthless service pretty much. I can't think of even one reason I would use Stickam over YouTube or Google Video.
You have misunderstood my post. If you reread my post you will see that It was not a slight directed at Stickam, it was directed at the sea of apparently competing technologies that seem to overlap and, as I clearly admit in my post, some of which I don't understand. Nowhere in my post do I say Stickam has this or that problem. I ask purely technical questions about it. I don't have time to try every product out there which is why I asked the questions.
There is a lot of perverts who are members on there, women and men, who just are lookin' to find someone to get off with. Stickam does have a block feature to kick people out of your room, but it only blocks them for a day. Also other random weird people will come into your room, cussing, lying, and talking crap who have no association with me from my myspace page where I embedded my Stickam player.
I know it's not Stickam's fault. It's doomed to happen with all live broadcasting webcam applications, but some type of security measures would make it a much enjoyable experience so I don't have to be blinded by another old man's balls.
I just wonder how business's and companies who will find their service interesting are going to take it? If they knew of all the perverts on there?
I would let people know what it is. But I fear that my page will get deleted. Or that myspace will find another way to block this beautiful thing that has come around.
BUT. if you know how to set up a live feed using a private ip....(b/c i use a router that has a private ip.) I might let you know the trick.
I want to let the public be able to have access to my port that my cam is set up to. But the cam site that I use requires a static ip???
so please. any help will do me good.
: ]]
However, in all seriousness. Stickam.. I've been a member there since October 2006. I have multipul accounts and even one on the .jp server. Yeah, thats right - there is a stickam.jp. I find it to be something to do rather than sit here on the inet wondering what to do - after the blogging, the reading, the updating ect. Someone said its for superficial people, come on now - welcome to the internet, user 7,368,275,878,764,876. I really don't like the stickam staff all too much and if you have children and gave them a webcam sux for you, hello 4chan raids. What is stickam really but a site for underage kids to get on cam, and get naked for the pedos out there. Ha, and they think IP banning is going to do anything about it - 3 seconds new ip - hello tor. I like the site not for the lives, tho harassing people in "raids" is entertaining. The main chat part is always fun for a laugh. Mostly people need to get out of the thought that Stickam is a blogging site. They provide no where to blog, and if they did i'd probably only use it for my secret purposes. The crowd you see on there are mostly the YouTube/Myspacers. We all know how annoying they are. But If you are far away from a loved one and several friends i suppose its a good idea to use stickam for that. It provides good voyer opertunities as well for those reclusive people on the internet because they allow you to view cams without having an account there and you can just sit there and watch people.
But, they anger me. Like i wouldnt even be here typing all of this if they hadn't shut the site down well they dont shut it down they make it so you cant go anywhere except for the main webmaster blog. And hoho, what was there this time - they shut it down so we could be linked here and vote. They did this before to get people to use the forums - hello that was pretty fail. Stickam needs to stick to what they do best and stop trying for all this recognition in areas they obviously dont belong. I realize they want to be as popular as Myspace - they put in forums. They dont really care about the users and if you happen to know anything about how the functions run on the site you are suddenly turned into instant Tech support for those that have no idea what they are doing. That gets to be the most annoying. It's easy to fly under the radar there and not be noticed, but at the same time dont anger stickam or you get B&. People do some stupid crap on that site - cutting ect. Like i sed made of lolz.