A drop-in replacement for Twitter’s deactivated unofficial share count API | Hacker News Reader

A drop-in replacement for Twitter’s deactivated unofficial share count API

opensharecount.com

15 pointsfranze8 comments

So their decision is because of a tech-stack switch (Cassandra to their own Manhattan)[0]. Redoing it in Manhattan apparently is too resource intensive and not enough users care about it for them to devote those resources to the project.

My guess is that they'll be back, but only if you pay for some service they'll offer.

I'm guessing we'll see how much of what @jack said about twitter being more developer friendly is now by seeing how long this stays up.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hard-decisions-for-a-sustainab...

Yep, which is why we included a quote from @jack about that in our launch press release: http://tech.leadstories.com/140185-what-twitter-takes-away-o...

This is a cool idea and nice drop-in for most homepages with a custom tweet button + share count-- great job to the devs that put it together! However, it appears to use the REST API's search endpoint to count the shares, which is focused on relevance and does not guarantee completeness [1]. This will probably will not be very accurate in most cases, especially for URLs with many thousands of tweets in between their periodic searches. Unfortunately, the only way to guarantee completeness is to use the Streaming API, and if your needs extend past the default 400 keywords allotted, you'll need to pay Twitter/Gnip.

1. "Before getting involved, it’s important to know that the Search API is focused on relevance and not completeness. This means that some Tweets and users may be missing from search results. If you want to match for completeness you should consider using a Streaming API instead." https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/search

Thanks, I am the dev who put it together. Has been quite the ride so far, going from zero to several million requests per day has been... interesting :-)

I don't know how incomplete the search results are but for most sites this should be enough to give a relative idea of the popularity of their posts. And in any case, I only built it in this way because this was the way Twitter suggested for getting information about links in the announcement they made about shutting down the share counter.

Am I the only one who misread this as an API that returns the number of shares outstanding in TWTR?

Gave it a try, doesn't appear to be working.

https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www...

"Sorry, that page does not exist"

This will not work anymore after November 20th, 2015!

Which is the problem that this site is trying to solve.

Just as expected.

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