Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

  • Star 2 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 0 You must be signed in to fork a gist
Star You must be signed in to star a gist
Save joshbuchea/e769eb87b6f462af8d71fcebc30c7061 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Get the share counts from various APIs

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.

Twitter

GET URL:

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

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

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
}
@mattnwa
Copy link

mattnwa commented Jun 14, 2018

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

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment