Tracking Stars With a Cell Phone

NEW YORK (AP) â€” So whatever happened to Henry Winkler? Well, career moves aside, he's scoping out the toiletries at a Duane Reade pharmacy in midtown Manhattan. <br><br>Uma Thurman? Looking toasty

Tuesday, January 23rd 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

NEW YORK (AP) â€” So whatever happened to Henry Winkler? Well, career moves aside, he's scoping out the toiletries at a Duane Reade pharmacy in midtown Manhattan.

Uma Thurman? Looking toasty in her long red coat in Union Square.

James Woods, well, he's looking good â€” shorter than he does on screen â€” as he strolls through Rockefeller Center.

From one end of the city to the other come the bulletins from amateur celebrity seekers. Filed via cell phone, pager or other device, the tidbits are posted to a Web forum, ``nyc celebrity sightings.''

For celebrity hounds who want instant notification, text messages on sightings can be flashed to a wireless pager.

The site was developed by New York-based Upoc (http://www.upoc.com), which lets users send instant messages for free to people with shared interests. Some wireless service providers charge for text messaging.

Similar celebrity-seeking groups have sprung up in Los Angeles and Boston.

So far, gossip columnists say they're not worried about competition.

``I'll bet we'll continue to have the best 'sightings' since we invented the genre,'' Richard Johnson, editor of the New York Post's Page Six, said in an e-mail.

Roughly 1,000 of Upoc's 27,000 members have joined ``nyc celebrity sightings,'' one of the first groups formed on the site. They share a handful of messages each day describing the activities of the rich and famous.

``I hadn't thought of this as a service,'' said Greg Clayman, a co-founder and vice president of marketing. ``What it did was prove that if you create the tools to let people do it, they will.''

Kasia Anderson, a reporter who covers celebrity news at the New York Daily News, said the service could be fun for amateur star-seekers but could also cause concern among celebrities.

``Any publicity is good publicity, but there's a certain structure to that lifestyle where you have your public time and your private time,'' Anderson said. The rapid exchange of information on celebrity doings ``does a lot to kind of destabilize this sort of shaky structure.''

She said she wouldn't use the service.

Clayman said he hadn't received any complaints from stars.

New York police said the information sharing would be a problem only if someone used it for something illegal, such as stalking.

Gordon Gould, Upoc's founder and chief executive, said the service was modeled on e-mail lists and Internet bulletin boards that let users create their own content. ``We looked at what was popular on the Net,'' he said.

Among other Upoc forums: business rumors, and where to find the cleanest public bathrooms in New York City.