StickiWidgets

We have updated Kismet Chat with a handful of new features. The live video board still loads 12 random Stickam players. At 15 second intervals a random screen will be loaded with a new live user. Duplicate streams should not be loaded and users on your Block list will not be loaded.

There are now 5 additional functions per screen.

Close and Lock Screen
Unloads the live video stream and locks the screen from reloading.

Block User and Reload Screen
Add the user to the Block List and Reloads screen with new random stream.

Open Profile
Opens the Stickam user profile in a new window.

Reload Screen
Reloads the screen with new random stream.

Lock/Unlock Screen
Locks and Unlocks the screen for reloads.

Two additional buttons and functions were added.

Block List
Opens a window and lists your blocked user list. Remove users from the block list.

Reload All
Initiates the reload of all 12 screens.

Serendipitous Chat has received significant traffic in the last few days. It has dropped substantially since its peak, but there is still some nice traffic. We appreciate all the attention and the people who enjoy the site. Our reports show that while visitor counts have been declining, the number of “return visitors” is at 45% for today. That’s great for us to see… We will continue to improve the site and features for you all to enjoy.

Serendipity of another sort made the news over at Read/Write Web. They have a nice post and interview with Garrett Camp, Chief Architect and co-founder of StumbleUpon. If you haven’t already, you should go check out the interview and definitely check out StumbleUpon. It is highly recommended.

… Garrett muses on the serendipity of SU and the “social interaction that emerges from using StumbleUpon” …
– Read/Write Web

Update (2006.10.17 @ 9:45 PDT): Just saw this post over at Chris Pirillo’s blog about “paid placement” of sites on StumbleUpon. We don’t have enough information to make a call on this one. You can decide for yourselves and read the excerpt from the email Chris received.

Serendipitous Chat was dugg a little over 24 hours ago. We have been monitoring the site and the traffic for the last 24 hours and everything looks good. There were no issues or outages that we know of and performance of the site itself was good. Not all the numbers are in, but Google Analytics is telling us we had over 20,000 unique visitors and 40,000 page views in the first 24 hours. That’s not all of it though, since the Stickam player is loaded with the help of Ajax, it is hard to determine all of the traffic on the site. We will have to wait for more detailed reporting from our hosting provider and see how many times the responder was hit. It also appears that Stickam’s video chat system held up to the additional traffic without any problems. We never imagined that we would receive this kind of attention and make it to digg.com.

Additional features are still planned for Serendipitous Chat and other variations of the theme so check back for updates.

As always, feedback and comments are welcomed.