"Social Polling" for American Idol on TV.com

We just launched an American Idol "social poll" on TV.com, an extremely high volume site. The poll is the first largescale deployment of iWidgets' new polling feature and shows off:

A sophisticated poll with 36 American Idol finalists to choose from

Realtime vote polling using AJAX

Badges that voters can add to their Facebook and MySpace profiles to show off their choice and get their friends to vote.

The poll is an iWidgets widget that is embedded into TV.com as an embedded iFrame and is virtually indistinguishable from TV.com. The ability to fit into existing sites is an excellent benefit of HTML/JavaScript widgets. The poll lets TV.com users vote for their favorite Idol from the final 36 idols:

Once the user votes, the poll shows how many votes each American Idol finalist has received as well as a banner promoting that the user show off their favorite Idol and get their friends to vote:

Clicking on the Facebook / MySpace / embed icons on the banner takes you to your social network to install a profile badge. The first step here is a new "targeted invite" feature that finds your friends that are already interested in American Idol, which people are much more likely to invoke:

A native social network widget is then added to your profile. Such profile badges can also include fresh video clips that can be monetized with pre-roll ads:

There is of course to obligatory "narrow" view so that Facebook users can add the widget to their highly visible wall/profile tab:

And a newsfeed update so that the users' friends take the poll and drive additional traffic to TV.com:

iWidgets' social polling is a great way to add a fun, seamlessly integrated widget to your website that engages your users to add your content to their social profiles and gets their friends to visit your website.