Introducing Watchers

People change jobs. They publish work, launch companies, speak at events, and open new public accounts. A profile that was accurate in January is incomplete by summer.

A watcher monitors one Orbit profile on a schedule you choose, hourly, daily, weekly, or anything up to every 30 days. Each run looks for new information about the person, verifies it, and adds it to the profile in real time. Orbit does the searching and the checking to keep your product, your knowledge graph, and your data up to date.

Every watcher can run three checks: updates to the sources already on the profile, the person's social activity, and new data on the person. Watch everything, or narrow a watcher to the checks you care about.

Create one from the Watchers tab in the dashboard, or with a single request. Pause, resume, reschedule, or delete a watcher at any time.

curl -X POST "https://api.orbitsearch.com/v3/watchers" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ORBIT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"orbit_id": "5bdad15f-40cb-47e1-83ed-e6cf874a976e", "interval_seconds": 86400}'

Webhooks turn a watcher into a push. Register an HTTPS endpoint once, and Orbit sends it a profile.updated event every time a watcher finds new information about a profile you watch. Your product reacts the moment the profile changes.

curl -X POST "https://api.orbitsearch.com/v3/webhooks" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ORBIT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://your-app.com/hooks/orbit", "event_types": ["profile.updated"]}'

One endpoint covers every watcher in your organization. Deliveries retry when your endpoint is busy, and each one carries an event id so you can process it once. Create, list, and remove endpoints through the API with a key that has the Webhooks scope.

When a run finds new information, Orbit sends your endpoint a profile.updated event with the number of new timeline events and a list of what changed: the new source, the updated page, the new posts.

Every run also lands in the watcher's run history in the API with the same list of changes, so you can see what a watcher found and when.

New data appears on the profile's Events Timeline as dated entries that carry the sources behind them, with the day, month, or year the event happened. Read them from sections.eventsTimeline on any profile read, and you have a history of the person that grows on its own.

Create watchers for everyone in your directory. Open the directory's Manage People tab, pick the people you want (or all of them), and choose a schedule.

The Updates feed shows a chronological timeline of every event for everyone in your directory. Everyone in your organization sees the same events in its Activity view.

Keep a CRM current. Surface a founder's new launch. Follow a portfolio of people. Trigger an agent when a profile gains new context. Watchers run on your Orbit credits: each check costs 1 credit, plus 5 credits when it finds something new. A profile checked daily that stays quiet costs about 30 credits a month.

Everything Watchers do is available through the Orbit people data API. Create a watcher for any profile, list its runs, read the Events Timeline from the profile, and receive profile.updated events at your endpoint. Start with one profile and a daily schedule, wire the event into the workflow that depends on that person, and grow from there to a directory. Your product stays current without another refresh job to maintain.