New marriage...twitter and digital signage

After twitter an the iPhone have some nice ways of playing together now digital signage and twitter get married to make your digital signage as interactive as can be. When reading the web (well not all obviously) I found this article at digital signage today

The convergence of digital signage and Twitter

Bill Yackey editor
• 04 Aug 2009

Like many industries, digital signage is seeing an increased presence on the social media site Twitter. Just by searching the term “digital signage” or the #digitalsignage hashtag, users are exposed to candid conversations about trends, news and products that previously only occurred in one-on-one phone calls and tradeshow floor chatter.

Twitter, and its 140-character messaging style, is also beginning to find its way on to digital signage screens, opening up a new way of engaging audiences and providing user-generated digital signage content.

Perhaps the most forward-thinking company in this area has been LocaModa, which has integrated Twitter into its digital signage social media tool Wiffiti. Previously, Wiffiti served as a platform where users could text messages to a short code and have them show up on screens in bars, restaurants, cafes, etc.

Now, LocaModa president Stephen Randall says the company is “tagging” Twitter terms, allowing Twitter to automatically send relevant messages to the screen which users can respond to. Take the term “weather,” for example:

A Locamoda Wiffiti screen featuring Twitter feeds.

“The most mundane topics like weather can be brought to life with Twitter,” Randall said. “Many digital signage screens feature a weather banner. If you tag Twitter with weather and display it on a Wiffiti screen, you can connect people all around the world. It could be raining I Massachusetts, and you could see messages from people in California talking about how sunny it is or from Japan talking about how it’s freezing. It can still tell you today’s weather, but tell you in a way that makes you feel connected.”

There are other approaches to integrating Twitter into digital signage content without launching an entire platform. Gavin Stark, VP of product development for Real Digital Media (RDM), said that since Twitter offers several RSS feeds per account, they could be integrated into content similar to the way news and weather feeds are:

1) Create a server somewhere that pre-processes the Twitter feed for certain formatting or exclusion rules

2) Take the RSS data straight in as a ticker.

3) Develop a flash page to read the RSS stream and jazz it up

4) Create a Web page (either as a Web archive or live from a server), use Javascript to read the RSS feed.

Stark said that for the BarCamp 2008 convention, he wrote a Web page that pulled Twitter hashtags on an RDM player and showed it on a 42-inch screen with a sidebar showing sponsors and RDM company info.