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.
GET URL:
http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stylehatch.co
Returns:
{
"count":528,
"url":"http://stylehatch.co/"
}
GET URL:
http://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://stylehatch.co
Returns:
{
"id": "http://stylehatch.co",
"shares": 61
}
GET URL:
http://api.pinterest.com/v1/urls/count.json?callback=&url=http://stylehatch.co
Result:
({"count": 0, "url": "http://stylehatch.co"})
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"
}
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"
}]
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
}
Thanks OP for the effort. These are handful resource.
To reply some queries posed some some readers, twitter count is never complete nowadays. Twitter doesnt provide total share count, so even those third party share counters who claim to keep the record of tweets of their own also can only track partially (because they too need to scrape data using twitter incomplete api)
There is one social signal counter I found most complete is by shareyt.com called SocialCounter.
They show 30 different share counts and they are pretty accurate. Although they dont offer api support.
http://shareyt.com/SocialCounter.php
Here is the link if it helps.