Stickam is a social networking site centered around user-submitted media (videos, photos, and audio). Stickam’s main focus is on its live streaming and video conferencing modes. Stickam is one of many life streaming video services, amongst the ranks of Ustream.tv, live.yahoo.com, and blogTV, to name a few.
User Interface: 
Here’s a snapshot of the main window that’s displayed when a user starts streaming live. If I were to grade Stickam’s UI based on just this, I’d easily give it five stars. This interface is probably the easiest to use that I’ve found from the video service sites I’ve been using. The main box on the top is the host, by default. Users can move any of the 6 panes on the right (it shows 7 because I’m the host) to the main window for their instance only. There are volume sliders for each pane as well, so users can adjust volume as they feel appropriate. Stickam supports up to 7 video/audio participants and lays them out well in this window.
The main UI for the site is a different story entirely. It becomes a little more clunky to navigate. The main reason the UI gets such a low grade is that each user can customize their profile in a manner that I can only relate to MySpace. I like the fact that a user can customize their profile, but there are too many young people on Stickam that think flashy GIF backgrounds and bright, obnoxious colors are “good design”. This is a pretty severe grade drop for Stickam’s UI, but I don’t feel that it’s too harsh.
User Experience: 
The usability of Stickam impresses me. If you know exactly where you’re going, it’s trivial to get the chat window opened and get into it. Even if you don’t, Stickam’s search feature makes it simple to find the people or media you’re looking for. Stickam also ranks current video feeds on multiple levels, such as most watched, most subscribed, featured, and Live StreamRank. If you want to see the top videos for today, this week, this month, or all time, Stickam facilitates that and makes it easy.
Features: 
The site’s primary features are the ability for users to upload their own media and video conferencing/streaming. I’ve been primarily focusing on the streaming side of Stickam and have to say that it’s pretty solid. There is a little bit of lag, which can be attributed to time of day, video chatters, people in the room, etc. For the most part, the lag is manageable but can be annoying.
Video and audio quality is also pretty solid. I’ve seen better, but I’ve also seen worse. Video quality can be controlled by the participant depending on their connection speed. Stickam attempts to determine the connection speed and adjust the setting automatically if you allow it to do so. I generally just leave mine on high because I have a fast, stable connection. From the audio side, conversations are pretty clear. As previously mentioned, any participating user can adjust the volume for an audio participant by adjusting a slider next to their user pane.
Stickam also allows the host of the room to record the chat. I’ve heard it from a few sources that the record function only records the host of the show – not other users or the text chat. This makes the feature basically worthless unless there’s just some settings that we missed (we were trying to record the PlurkCast last night).
Performance: 
Stickam’s performance is best described as sporadic — it works when it wants to. Over the course of last night’s PlurkCast, we experienced two or three crashes, and even had to switch hosts because Stickam refused to let us restart the room. This is completely unacceptable and ultimately caused us to switch to live.yahoo.com for the remainder of the night.
When Stickam was working, the video and audio performance was on par with my expectations. I wasn’t blown away by any fantastic performance, but wasn’t irritated by anything but intermittent latency. There were also reports that some users were having problems hearing everyone that was sending audio.
Overall Impression:
A major drawback of Stickam that I couldn’t find a place for is that I feel a large portion of the user base is young people or people who use abusive language. There are no filters in Stickam as it’s a live streaming site. I also noticed that most of the rooms had enticing pictures of the host (generally female) in an effort to draw people into their room. As far as worthwhile content on Stickam, I haven’t found any. Right now it’s just a playground for teenagers who aren’t in school yet.
Ranting aside, I feel that Stickam has a good handle on the video conferencing world. It’s going where nobody else is going. Personally, I could do without all the alternate media fluff and have Stickam stick to the video conferencing, which I feel is their strongest feature.
There are some things that need to change in Stickam. Recording needs to record the entire window, just like it’s a screencast. This will make the resulting video actually worthwhile for those who weren’t able to participate. Stickam also needs to allow people to have a video conference for longer than an hour, which seems to be about the time we got kicked out.
All things considered, Stickam is a useful tool for video conferencing if that’s all you’re looking for. It’s as simple as going to a live user’s profile and popping out the chat, assuming you have an account and are signed in. It’s definitely one of the better free, collaborative video sites I’ve found, but certainly has room for improvement.
