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Twitter Wants No Part of JustSpotted Celebrity Stalking Website

by Amar Toor on October 15, 2010 at 09:02 AM

Just Spotted
A new site called JustSpotted provides Web surfers with the latest geographic locations of over 7,000 celebrities, based on user-submitted sightings and aggregated data from social networking sites. Set to launch on Tuesday, the site was originally designed with licensed software from Twitter, which would've allowed the company to automatically filter out every tweet pertaining to high-profile sightings. Now, though, Twitter is having second thoughts.

Although Twitter had indeed licensed tools to the startup, it didn't realize that JustSpotted would use its software to stalk celebrities. Once the company discovered JustSpotted's true purpose, it decided to withdraw both its name and software from the hat. "JustSpotted, then known as Scoopler, had previously licensed Twitter's 'firehose' data feed of all public tweets for its real-time search engine, Scoopler.com," the Twitter representative told CNET, via e-mail. "JustSpotted.com is not the product we licensed, and we have terminated their agreement."

Yesterday, however, JustSpotted CEO AJ Asver beamed about his site's relationship with Twitter, implying that everything was hunky dory between the two. "We've been working very closely with Twitter for two years," Asver told the Hollywood Reporter. "We're one of a handful of companies that has that sort of relationship with them." Now, though, the CEO has changed his tune.

"The relationship we had with Twitter was for our real-time search product," Asver told CNET. "JustSpotted continues to aggregate updates from lots of sources, including Twitter, where we have always been using their publicly available APIs." In other words, gossip-hungry users will still be able to sate their voyeuristic appetites at JustSpotted, but Twitter isn't ready to support any citizen paparazzi.

Tags: API, celebrities, geolocation, Hollywood, HollywoodReporter, justspotted, license, privacy, scoopler, SocialNetworking, software, stalking, top, twitter

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