In the age of location updates, status updates, and tweets, it’s a wonder that more people aren’t out there stalking celebrities. I mean, people were doing that long before any of these services existed, and these new tools make it significantly easier. And now comes another new tool to make celebrity real time tracking even easier: JustSpotted.
Obviously, they’re not positioning the tool to be used for stalking. Instead, it’s meant to give fans an idea of what their favorite celebrities are up to at any given moment. Oh look, George Clooney is in Spain right now. Angelina Jolie is in France. And it’s being billed as a way for celebrities to better connect with their fans.
So how does JustSpotted get this celebrity location information? It’s a combination of data from Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, alongside their own data they’ll be collecting from users who actual spot celebrities in the wild.
The service, which is launching in one week, is the latest creation by AJ Asver, Dilan Jarawardane and Benjamin Tauber. If you’ve heard any of their names before, perhaps it’s because you’ve heard of Scoopler, the real time search engine that launched amid some fanfare back in early 2009 and got backing from Y Combinator, Ron Conway, Michael Birch, Avalon Ventures, and a few others.
But just like former rival OneRiot this morning, Scoopler is now ditching real time search in favor of this more focused JustSpotted idea. “We’re using the technology we developed while working on real time search to aggregate all the sightings, Twitter updates, status updates, news articles, blog posts — pretty much everything on the web related to a celebrity and put it all on one destination site,” Asver tells us.
“We’re using technology to refresh a space that really hasn’t changed that much since TMZ and Perez Hilton moved in and started blogging. We’re able to aggregate and produce 100X more content that most of these sites but without having to hire a huge team of reporters,” he continues.
Obviously, celebrity news/information is big business so this pivot seems like a smart one. We should know more about how well it actually works next week, but for now, these are the core features of JustSpotted:
- The JustSpotted “Globe Spotters” map, which shows real-time celebrity sightings from around the world. By aggregating the information available from all other services (Twitter, Foursquare, etc) with the reported sightings by fans, JustSpotted has created a fluid world map that will allow you to easily see where your favorite celebrities are right now.
- One-stop destination for over 700 celebrity sightings everyday; this is 100x more than any other celebrity news site..
- Editorial team to produce engaging breaking news content based on the incoming sightings and updates
- Up to the minute user updates for celebrity fans in real-time
