We held off on this hoping to be able to be able to embed each animation right on the results page, but don’t want to keep everyone waiting, so here they are. Winner, runner-ups and honorable mentions of Stick animation contest can all be found here.

How long does it take to sort through and watch 527 Stick entries? About 4 hours!

Right off, thank you to everyone that participated in and/or mentioned the Stick animation contest to someone else. We had a pretty good turnout and it was actually kind of fun to go through all the entries. Surprisingly, there was only one “pornographic” entry labeled “cleaning” – cute! I won’t erase it.

Anyway here is some preliminary data while we now wait for Xat.com to make some decisions:

We started with a total 527 entries (English and Spanish combined). Two hours later that number was reduced to 95; primarily discarding those animations that were either too jerky, jumpy, or simple. We tried to focus more on those animations that tended to be smoother more unique or creative. About an hour later we reduced the number of possibles again, this time down to 43; it was getting harder and harder to eliminate. 15 minutes later we again reduced the number but this time only to 30. Our last and final elimination round, some 15 minutes later, brought the number down to 27 and well, we quit! LOL! It just got too hard to decide beyond this point and we’d rather hand it off to Xat.com so that they have some variety to choose from.

More stats:
Xatworld entries: 374
Mundoxat entries: 153

Longest entry goes to Ryan (English) with a whopping 1982 characters!

We’ll keep you updated as soon as we hear from Xat and we’ll post the final 27 along with the winner. Thanks again everyone and good luck to all of you!

Just before the new year we mentioned the possibility of having a contest for best Stick animation. We were light on details at that moment but have since worked everything out. So…without further adieu, here it is!

Xatworld/Mundoxat’s official “Best Stick animation wins a Purple (and more) contest!“. Note that all Xatworld entries must be submitted as a comment to this same post.

Also, while you’re here, don’t forget two very important but unrelated things:
1. Sign up for and follow the official Xatworld Twitter feed (actually this one IS related as we will be posting contest updates here(
2. Visit our friends over at Xatblogs.com and get your own Xat blog right now!

Thanks everyone and good luck to all!

Update 1-15-2010: Comments have been closedand we’ll be sorting through all the entries over the next few days and will post the five finalists and the winning entry then.

Thanks to everyone that either took the time to participate and/or tell anyone else about the contest. Good luck to all!

We are unofficially announcing and preparing everyone for a BEST STICK ANIMATION contest. We are working out a few of the details but what we do know we’ll share with you now.

We know:
- the contest will be for best Stick animation
- prize will be 1 (one) Purple
- our understanding (waiting for confirmation) is that the winning design will become and be used for the official Xat Stick power smile (very cool!)

We don’t know:
- who will judge it
- how long the contest will be open to submissions

As soon as we get confirmation on this, we’ll make the official announcement here on Xatworld.

Get your Stick power, stay tuned and start practicing!

This week we ransacked our local 7-Eleven and walked away with as many $10 Ultimate Game Cards (value = 1200 xats + 60 days) as we could get our hands on (12 to be exact). The clerk said that to date, it was the largest single purchase of UGC’s cards that he had ever seen. - 

Our goal is to give these cards away and to continue buying and gifting new cards each month. We understand that not everyone has the ability to purchase xats, powers, and days, and since we have had success with this in the past (both here and here), this seemed like a good way to keep giving loyal Xatworld.com users a little something back.

Q: Hey, huh, wait! How do I improve my chances of winning a UGC card?
A: We will occasionally announce UGC giveaways via our official Xatworld twitter feed, so be sure to follow us there. Also, since many of our giveaways are time-sensitive (i.e. “first five people to blah blah blah”), once signed up, we strongly suggest getting our tweets sent directly to your mobile phone.

Good luck to everyone!

twitter.com/xatworld

Today we gave away our second Ultimate game card; this one worth $10 (1200 xats and 60 days). Those users following our Twitter account were notified yesterday and again today, some 45 minutes before the giveway, that we would publish the URL to a chat. Users were asked to login to the chatbox as quickly as they could as only the first five to enter would qualify for the next round; a Xat related trivia question .

The winner was Yaseeeen16 (141752982), who was the first to “correctly” answer:

Question: “What is the current price of the mod8 Xat power?”
Answer: 500 xats

Honorable mention goes out to the other four finalists which include MrCLoneMkw (first one to enter the chat), xJoMan112x (this is Joman’s second time to make into the finalists), PurpLeAndrew (Andrew was the fastest at answering the trivia question but unfortunately failed to specify his answer in xats or days), and NamikazesHeir.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

To those who didn’t/couldn’t make it or just didn’t know, be sure to follow our Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/xatworld) for the next contest. It should be sometime next week and we have more cards to giveaway!

Good luck!

Xat is giving its users the chance to win Xat’s newest, yet-to-be released Sport power. The power will go out to whoever submits the “best Xatspace” via Xat’s support system (create a new ticket and select “SPORT power competition” as the help topic.

More specific competition details can be found here.