Topsy has launched what it’s calling Social Modules: embeddable widgets that bring Twitter content to any website. Topsy isn’t the first nor only way to do this — Twitter itself offers several flavors of embeddable widgets — but Topsy’s version offers a few brand-friendly options that I haven’t seen available elsewhere.

Topsy’s module-maker is similar to what Twitter offers (and others), but with a couple notable differences that businesses should appreciate:

• Tweets can be filtered by influence (see the middle check box in the image above; see Topsy’s website to read how it determines influence)
• Tweets are profanity-free
• Content can be filtered to only include links that point to the brand’s domain
• The widgets can be monetized

The filtering I describe is possible because Topsy’s modules pull content from its own index of tweets — an index that Topsy says is the biggest available — and not from the raw “firehose” feed of tweets.

In my brief time playing with the module maker, I noticed one minor drawback to this: The tweets that display are not up-to-the-minute. The most recent tweets I saw were about a half-hour old. I’m guessing that businesses and publishers will probably look on that as a fair trade-off for having a cleaner, brand-friendly Twitter feed to display on their sites.

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Search Engines: Real Time Search | Topsy

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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