Insteo Launches Free US Election Social Gadgets

September 11, 2012 by Dave Haynes

The folks at Insteo, down in Long Beach, CA, have put together a nice promotion that provides US network operators with a great free tool to use on screens in the last days of the US presidential election this fall, while also showcasing Insteo’s social content capabilities.

The company has developed three gadget/widgets/thingdoodles that pull and filter the best tweets supporting the Democrats or Republicans, or send up the lot of them. The Twitter visualizations are HTML5-based, and the tweets pass through Insteo’s patent-pending content filter that removes profanity and negativity.

So, suggests Insteo, if you’re Backing Barack you won’t see any bad comments about ObamaCare, or if you’re With Mitt you won’t see any bad comments about RomneyCare. If you Don’tCare and just want a laugh, choose LOL2012 – and we’ll send you clean yet funny tweets about the election, right to your digital signs.

Insteo’s Twitter Apps use HTML5, so you’ll need modern cloud-based Digital Signage software, which is why Signagelive stepped in with a free preview. If our Apps don’t work with your current outdated solution, there’s no need to HOPE – it’s time for you to CHANGE! (copywriter’s note… what, too cheesy?)

The Apps will be live on October 23rd, exactly two weeks before the big day.

So, you can take something for two weeks that is packaged up and ready to go, and supports the most current web content service, HTML5. OR, you  can set up your own stream and 1) hope it is stable, 2) hope it can handle the volume of possible tweets, and 3) pray no one ever uses naughty words on Twitter, and that of course rarely happens.

My understanding is this service just involves dropping HTML embed code into the signage platform – assuming it supports HTML5 – and it is all automated from there. This is not just hashtags or regurgitating specific Twitter handles. As well as filtering, this is doing Twitter aggregation – combining tweets that support either party from across the spectrum – combining hundreds of accounts, keywords and hashtags together.

I have learned through the years in talking to guys like Stephen Randall at LocaModa and Jim Nista at Insteo that tapping into social streams doesn’t look all that complicated at first glance … but it is.

I also like this service because it is FULL SCREEN. Yay. Imagine, content people could actually read from a distance.