Celebrities, Social Media | featured news

The celebrity gossip machine had burbled for a day or two about Ozzy Osbourne's marriage, and for weeks about Jada Pinkett Smith's. Yet both stars hit a breaking point at about the same time — and took to Facebook.

Rapper Snoop Dogg gave props on Twitter to an ad for the Toyota Sienna minivan. Actress Tori Spelling linked to a website for rental cars. And reality TV star Khloe Kardashian soliloquized about the brand of jeans that accentuates the famous Kardashian derriere.

JustSpotted plans to sift through people’s tweets to identify those that claim celebrity spottings, and then to place those celebrities’ whereabouts on a map in real time. It would be similar to the now-defunct GawkerStalker, but it would be faster. (It’s not a novel idea. Last year, start-up OMGICU proposed to do the same thing, supported by text messaging and tweets, except its service requires active user participation rather than data-mining the whole Twitter community like JustSpotted will do.)

After a string of real celebrity deaths last week, the Internet and online social networks killed a few more stars.

This was one special tweet for Lance Armstrong.

After the social-networking service Twitter announced Monday it was in talks to develop an unscripted series based on the site, two of the service's most prolific users have expressed fear that such a jump would mean an unfair intrusion on their lives.

Celebrity Ashton Kutcher narrowly beat out CNN early Friday in an online popularity contest to see who could more quickly attract 1 million followers on the micro-blogging site Twitter.