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!

Today Xat announced that it would soon have details on two new powers that are actively being developed; they are Stick and Countdown.

We were turned on to the new Stick power about a week ago but were understandably gagged asked not to blog about it; surprises are always good!

Since the cat is, so to speak, “out of the bag”, we will confirm and reiterate what many have already found out. Stick allows a user to create single (this is important), stick figure animations. Contrary to what we were hoping for, Stick does not allow you to create your own multi-character animations. Still, with a little ingenuity, we don’t see why you couldn’t include two or more such animations and push the creative boundaries of this new power.

Stick will be accessible via the vertical tabs located at the left of any chatbox. Just look for and click on the Games tab, then on the Stick figure.

Once open, the Stick interface will allow you to create frame by frame animations of your stick figure.

From our conversation with Xat staff, we understand that they were shooting for something that could be unique to each user. We think that they’ve done it!

Xat’s second power, Countdown, which at the moment we know nothing about, may be an answer to Xat’s own power countdown clock. That’s our educated guess!

Example:
** 500 CLEAR POWERS ** in 8 hours (22:00 UTC) Count down: http://xat.com/h?348982

We’ll have to wait and see