• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 2, 2012

Involver has created a near-real-time ad meter that will tally votes on Super Bowl XLVI ads from sites across the Internet. The Facebook platform has been built into the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter, giving the social tool a facelift.

Typically, the tallies get released in the newspaper the following Monday. This year the platform will tally votes from widgets on sites across the Web as the New England Patriots and the New York Giants battle it out during Super Bowl XLVI. Viewers will watch the ads and vote. Scores will be counted and ranked until voting ends on Tuesday. USA Today will reveal the tallies for a day, take down the findings, and then report them again soon after.

Developers coding in HTML and Java can insert tags into the frame of most Web pages to display calculating scores, or leaderboard, display numbers in near-real-time. Unlike a traditional widget, publishers can integrate the leaderboard into a page layout as part of the page, explains Roland Smart, senior director of product marketing at Involver.

Smart said all tags communicate through a backend system to update simultaneously. As users across mobile devices, on and off Facebook, vote using the infrastructure, the information is aggregated through one cloud-based platform and serves up in a leaderboard.

Involver's platform can support 2,600 concurrent HTTP requests, with about 3,600 total requests per second. The platform can handle 5.4 million user transactions per hour, such as voting or watching a video. The system can serve thousands of requests per second at sub-second response times.

Media buyers may find this application supports other industries, such as voting on political issues, according to Smart.