Topsy Launches Brand-Friendly Twitter Widgets

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.