Stickam, one of the major players jockeying for the title “YouTube of Live Video,” has quietly turned off one of their major features in an attempt to curb incidences of a troubling nature on their service.

One of the blogs I’ve followed over the years has been Trench Reynold’s MyCrimeSpace, a site built around chronicling all the very disturbing crimes that take place around mainstream social networks and Web 2.0 sites. With increasing frequency, Stickam has been making more appearances in the macabre catalogue of sexual assaults, pedophilia and murders that Trench writes about on a daily basis.

Trench seems to be the only one to have publicly chronicled the move by Stickam to turn off private video chats:

I’ve been getting a lot of search traffic lately for phrases like “no more Stickam private”. I thought to myself this couldn’t possibly be true but when I moseyed on over to Stickam, after putting on my internet hazmat suit, I noticed that there were no more settings for private rooms.

Has Stickam done away with private rooms or is this just a temporary glitch. As far as I know Stickam has not made any kind of official announcement.

If they did turn it off it’s amazing that it only took a couple of sexual assaults.

A quick search through Stickam’s public announcements turns up no mention of the feature’s deactivation, though the buzz on discussion boards and forums seem to say that the “private chat removal bug” can be circumvented by switching to a “classic layout.”

Regardless, it occurs to me that it might have been simpler and possibly more lucrative to start charging for the ability to private chat by Stickam.  Clearly this is a coveted feature, and the pitfall from the feature was that underage girls were prey for unscrupulous pedophiles.  If you make the private chat feature a paid upgrade, it would at least somewhat mitigate the ability for minors to make the purchase since ostensibly most kids of minority age don’t possess credit cards.