Stickam - are you really that interesting?

Posted 1 year, 7 months ago at 8:45 am. 0 comments

The beaming Mr Scoble writes of his extreme pleasure with Stickam, a site which does legitimately (i.e. you tell it to) what a whole web-worth of voyeurs wish they could do insidiously; namely, it turns on your webcam and broadcasts you sitting there typing/surfing/scratching to anybody who desires to view it.  Now while Robert ponders the business model and practical applications for Stickam, coming up with something along the lines of “oh, you’re working from home and the rest of the office want to see your furrowed brow!”, the rest of us nod sagely and mutter “one for the pornographers”. 

Success of the chirpy YouTube clone, XTube (NSFW), which picks up the pervert baton where the social video sight left off (or, more accurately, left clothes on), shows that the overwhelming desire to flaunt one’s wobbly bits continues unabated.  Whether XTube’s own monetisation plans - to charge for “premium” content from official studios - is working I’m not sure.  Ironically, a casual glance gives the impression that many of the pay-per-view titles run along the staged “amateur” theme, as is topically popular among the strokers and the shakers, and so you wonder who exactly is paying for fake-amateur when real-amateur is free?

Of course, the privacy monkeys will get all in a babble about Stickam, likely resorting to tabloid headlines to make their point.  “Perverts spy on your kids!” will be the gist of the hype, though whether the sight of teenagers blandly surfing some unseen screen, picking at their spots and munching chips 24/7 will stoke or abate the arousal of the online predators who are, we’re told, in every dark crevice of the information super highway, remains to be seen. 

Far more concerning to me is the creeping spread of Reality TV, with every Tom, (hard) Dick and Mary believing them to be interesting enough to consume my bandwidth.  The placatory will merely point out that I needn’t visit the site if I don’t want to, but considering Stickam is heavily pushing their external integration I’m bound to come across some random bleary face on my surf-travels.  Might I therefore suggest a metaphorical sniper-rifle plugin, which if clicked by enough viewers will permanently delete a dullard’s account and save our aching eyes.