Holy craps. I COMPLETELY found this by accident, and now I feel as though I’ve just stumbled onto the coolest toy ever, and for once, I found out about it without four dozen people sending me e-mail invites to it. Qik is, in short, live video broadcasting from your phone. And I mean LIVE.

I found the app almost by accident last week after jailbreaking my iPhone and messing around with the stuff available on Cydia. It said it was an app for using the phone as a webcam, so I thought “Heh – cool. I can use it when we go to conventions instead of having to hook up a regular webcam.” I didn’t really dicker around with it too much, ’cause I figured I had to plug in site info to direct the webcam feed to. However, when standing around waiting for my boss to get off the phone so we could go out to lunch, I absent-mindedly clicked it and found out what it REALLY was… a live-streaming camera app that automatically uploads and saves to a website. After testing it out, I’m kind of hooked.

I just spent 10 minutes watching a stream of a guy just walking around in a city in Japan… no idea where, but it was happening right then and there. And the other cool thing is that you can actually live chat while you’re watching the feed. And judging by how quick the responses are… I’d say it’s pretty damned fast. 5 seconds or so.

Anyway, you can subscribe to an RSS feed if you want, and feel free to go check it out all you want. I’m actually doing sort of a live broadcast right now of me working on the comic, in case you have any small amount of interest. My username is saguself, but you can just click here if you’re lazy. :)

Also, I think we might use this to broadcast video when the Greg Liz and Ben show goes live again. Could be some very cool uses, there. :)

Last night, about 18 or so of you guys logged on to Qik and watched me do the comic, live – all the way up to the point that I uploaded it and you were able to read it. That, to me, is just incredibly cool.

In the interest of making it easier for you to know when I’m putting something up in the future (I’ll probably liveblog the comic every now and again – definately tonight) I’ve set up a twitter feed. I’ve resisted twitter as long as I could, since I find that kind of short-attention-span blogging not to be to my liking, but as a notification tool for things that are going on, it’s actually pretty useful. So anyhow, if you subscribe to http://twitter.com/rlcomics (reallifecomics was taken by someone who wanted to notify people of stuff on my comic, I guess. If I could get that username back, I’d be eternally grateful.) you’ll get a tweet whenever I start a new Qik video that I feel is worth sharing. And don’t forget, when you watch the video, assuming I’m at home and on my computer, you can livechat with me, also. The jailbreak Qik app I’m using isn’t really working properly with that at the moment… I’ll have to look into it. :)