Microsoft wants you to creep celebs with its new iPhone app

Whether you like it or not, celebrities are a big thing. People love knowing popular personalities’ every move. To leverage this very creepy human condition of ours, Microsoft has decided it fit to release a celebrity-tracking app called Snipp3t for iOS.

Snipp3t is not really tracking in the sense that celebrities are being tracked via GPS. It’s essentially a news aggregator slash organisor at its core. Over 100 000 big Hollywood names are given a profile of which the user can choose their favourites. Mentions of these celebrities around the web (or Bing) are then curated into one app for you to lurk. An interesting move by Microsoft.

First off, celebrities? Microsoft is usually associated with productivity apps like Office, Outlook and so on.

The company’s engineers apparently found that celebrity search results were actually better on Bing than on its competitor Google Search. In a blog post Donald Soon, Program Manager for Microsoft, notes that “[celebrity news] wasn’t the only segment Bing was popular in, but it was one of our strong points in terms of freshness and also depth of content.”

The tech giant says that the app is currently in experiment mode, and its success depends on whether or not we’ll see an Android and Windows Phone version.

Snipp3t reinforces the idea that Microsoft’s not a Windows-first company anymore, as outlined by CEO Satya Nadella. It’s been developed to demonstrate Bing’s flexibility as a platform.

“We’re showing here that we can actually use the existing data that we have and then put it into maybe a slightly different skin, an app experience, and then provide an awesome experience to a user,” says Soon.

So if following your role models on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram wasn’t enough of a fix. It’s like a social network built around celebs where the only action happens through the plebs actively engaging.