Twitter severs ties to parent of new celebrity-tracking website
Twitter is distancing itself from a controversial, celebrity-spotting website that’s slated to launch next week.
JustSpotted plans to use Twitter feeds, in combination with Facebook updates, Foursquare posts and blog updates, to track celebrities anywhere around the world in real-time. The website will plot stars’ positions on maps, with information about the restaurants or other places where they are spotted — but not the actual addresses.
The site’s co-founder, A.J. Asver, said the star-gawking feature, which is scheduled to launch Tuesday, is intended to indulge fans’ desire to get the latest information about famous actors and athletes using publicly available information. He also envisions fans contributing their own celebrity sightings to the site.
But JustSpotted raised alarms among privacy advocates, who say it represents a new kind of intrusion on people’s lives.
“Once a celebrity might have worried about someone with a camera and a flash,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Now they have to worry about someone with a cellphone and a Twitter account.”
Other celebrity-focused sites have considered doing something similar since the debut of Gawker Stalker, which features sightings of celebrities on the treadmill in the gym, attending a book signing or peering out from the back seat of a limo.
“We’ve looked at various ways to do it, but you’ve got to be careful not to invade someone’s privacy,” said Alan Citron, president of Buzz Media, a collection of 40 pop-culture websites. “So you look at doing some sort of delayed reporting process.”
Twitter on Thursday severed its relationship with JustSpotted’s parent company, Scoopler Inc., a week after learning of the new celebrity-focused site.
Scoopler, which got funding from incubator Y Combinator in 2008, had originally said it would be using a direct connection to all 90 million daily public Tweets on the service to power a real-time search engine.
“JustSpotted.com is not the product we licensed, and we have terminated their agreement,” Twitter spokesman Matt Graves said in an e-mailed statement.
Gartner Inc. analyst Ray Valdes said cooperating with JustSpotted would compromise the mutually beneficial relationship that Twitter has forged with celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, providing stars a way to reach out to fans while helping drive Twitter’s own rising popularity.
“Stars get a direct, real-time channel to their fan base, and users get an ongoing glimpse into the ‘real’ life of their favorite star,” Valdes said in an e-mail. “JustSpotted’s new strategy changes this win-win equation to one that gives it a short-term gain, while posing a long-term risk to Twitter. JustSpotted’s approach favors the needs of a few fans over celebrities’ need for privacy. The risk to Twitter is that celebrities will clam up or shut down their Twitter feed, resulting in a loss of appeal to fans. It makes sense that Twitter is acting to protect its interests.”
Twitter’s decision will have little practical effect on JustSpotted, which can continue to collect publicly available celebrity tweets through a slower, more cumbersome process referred to as scraping.
Asver said in an e-mail response that the company would continue to aggregate updates from multiple sources, including Twitter.
