Get the share counts from various APIs

gistfile1.md

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.

Twitter

http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stylehatch.co

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

Facebook

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

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

LinkedIn

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

POST URL

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

POST BODY

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

Great write up! The Pinterest /urls endpoint has been removed sometime in the last week FYI.