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.
http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stylehatch.co
Returns:
{ "id": "http://stylehatch.co", "shares": 61 }
Great write up! The Pinterest /urls endpoint has been removed sometime in the last week FYI.