Share Counts

I have always struggled with getting all the various share buttons from Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, etc to align correctly and to not look like a tacky explosion of buttons. Seeing a number of sites rolling their own share buttons with counts, for example The Next Web I decided to look into the various APIs on how to simply return the share count.

If you want to roll up all of these into a single jQuery plugin check out Sharrre

Many of these API calls and methods are undocumented, so anticipate that they will change in the future. Also, if you are planning on rolling these out across a site I would recommend creating a simple endpoint that periodically caches results from all of the APIs so that you are not overloading the services will requests.

VKontakte

GET URL:

http://vk.com/share.php?act=count&index=1&url={url}

Returns:

VK.Share.count(1, 300);

Twitter

GET URL:

https://opensharecount.com/count.json?url={url}

Returns:

{
    "count":528,
    "url":"http://stylehatch.co/"
}

Facebook

GET URL:

http://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://stylehatch.co

Returns:

{
   "id": "http://stylehatch.co",
   "shares": 61
}

Pinterest

GET URL:

http://api.pinterest.com/v1/urls/count.json?callback=&url=http://stylehatch.co

Result:

({"count": 0, "url": "http://stylehatch.co"})

LinkedIn

GET URL:

http://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=http://stylehatch.co&format=json

Returns:

{
    "count":17,
    "fCnt":"17",
    "fCntPlusOne":"18",
    "url":"http:\/\/stylehatch.co"
}

Google Plus

GET URL:

http://share.yandex.ru/gpp.xml?url={url}

Returns:

{
   "id": "http://stylehatch.co",
   "shares": 61
}

POST URL:

https://clients6.google.com/rpc?key=YOUR_API_KEY

POST body:

[{
    "method":"pos.plusones.get",
    "id":"p",
    "params":{
        "nolog":true,
        "id":"http://stylehatch.co/",
        "source":"widget",
        "userId":"@viewer",
        "groupId":"@self"
        },
    "jsonrpc":"2.0",
    "key":"p",
    "apiVersion":"v1"
}]

Returns

[{
    "result": { 
        "kind": "pos#plusones", 
        "id": "http://stylehatch.co/", 
        "isSetByViewer": false, 
        "metadata": {
            "type": "URL", 
            "globalCounts": {
                "count": 3097.0
            }
        }
    } ,
    "id": "p"
}]

StumbledUpon

GET URL:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url=http://stylehatch.co

Result:

{
    "result":{
        "url":"http:\/\/stylehatch.co\/",
        "in_index":true,
        "publicid":"1iOLcK",
        "views":39,
        "title":"Style Hatch - Hand Crafted Digital Goods",
        "thumbnail":"http:\/\/cdn.stumble-upon.com\/mthumb\/941\/72725941.jpg",
        "thumbnail_b":"http:\/\/cdn.stumble-upon.com\/bthumb\/941\/72725941.jpg",
        "submit_link":"http:\/\/www.stumbleupon.com\/submit\/?url=http:\/\/stylehatch.co\/",
        "badge_link":"http:\/\/www.stumbleupon.com\/badge\/?url=http:\/\/stylehatch.co\/",
        "info_link":"http:\/\/www.stumbleupon.com\/url\/stylehatch.co\/"
    },
    "timestamp":1336520555,
    "success":true
}