Real-time Data Streaming for Argentinian Elections Coverage

Yesterday we had congressional elections at Argentina and online media prepared to cover it in different ways on the Web. Argentinian Twitter users agreed to use the hashtag #urna2009 in their messages, creating this way a better way to track elections-related messages.

At Zauber we decided to develop an experiment to follow the elections in real-time, digging into some technologies we have been researching lately. We developed a simple web page that integrated Facebook Connect, Twitter Streaming API together with our technology of Events and Messages Bus, XMMP messages routing and HTTP persistent connections. The result was a product capable of showing in real-time the stream of tweets (those referrering to certain keywords and hashtags) together with updates from external RSS sources with elections-related news and real-time trends of mentions to our candidates and some other keywords.

You can see some screenshots here:

See it running on iPhone also:

We are really pleased about how the community engaged with our technology and the wonderful comments of support we received.

Now we have shut down access to the Zauber Stream for a couple of days, while we keep on working on improving performance and scalability and thinking of new features to add, planning to provide real-time data streaming on new occasions. Stay tuned !