Twitter has said “thanks but no thanks” to a new site which some critics say is a tool for stalking celebrities. CNET.com reports that Twitter has canceled a licensing deal with start-up site JustSpotted, which is planning to launch a service which combs through millions of Tweets to collect and share information on people who have recently spotted celebrities and posted updates on their Twitter accounts.
In a story in the October 13 edition of The Hollywood Reporter, JustSpotted CEO AJ Asver touted the company’s close relationship with Twitter, including being “one of a handful of companies” with a deal to license Twitter’s tools to facilitate its service. However, a Twitter representative said that the company has backed out of its deal with JustSpotted and suggested that the nature of the service the start-up provides was different than originally promised to Twitter.
“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 wrote. “JustSpotted.com is not the product we licensed, and we have terminated their agreement.”
In an email to CNET on Thursday, Asver said that “JustSpotted continues to aggregate updates from lots of sources, including Twitter, where we have always been using their publicly available APIs.”
JustSpotted plans to launch on October 19.