See how many times a URL has been shared on Facebook

Twitter: http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://new...

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/cws/share-count?url=http://news.ycom...

These APIs are marked private (as opposed to Facebook's) so use at your own risk.

I packaged a few of the private ones with this weekend project: http://sharedcount.com Unfortunately, only Facebook does URL normalization for you, so dumb things like trailing slashes have a big effect on the count.

> Unfortunately, only Facebook does URL normalization for you, so dumb things like trailing slashes have a big effect on the count.

Is that true?

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://new...

I stand corrected. Twitter used to suck at URL normalization, but it looks like they must have fixed it. But, Delicious and Digg both are a pain.

Is there an API for complete URL normalization, including unshortening URLs?

Facebook and Twitter, do basic normalization, but do not unshorten shortened links.

edit: This has already been discussed on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577457

edit 2: graphs.facebook.com will aggressively and unfortunately normalize any YouTube link to youtube.com. See, for example, http://graph.facebook.com/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB8... This give the number of shares for youtube.com, not this individual video. I am not sure how to get facebook share stats for a particular YouTube video.

Very nice, thanks for sharing. Bit of constructive feedback, the fact that the text box deletes itself as soon as you click in it is hella annoying,

Noted, and fixed. I was using HTML5 placeholder. I'll just put it in the value instead.

Seeing the comment counts makes me wonder what the comments were. Is there any way to see those?

Perhaps you'd like to also display the Google Page Rank, or something to that effect, like the shares of the domain.

Thanks for sharing these - tremendously helpful!

The Twitter information is also available via Topsy's public Otter API. See trackback_total:

http://otter.topsy.com/urlinfo.json?url=http://news.ycombina...

http://otter.topsy.com

Google Buzz: https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/count?alt=json...

Which is also a public API.

And with this you can actually check multiple sites in one call:

https://www.googleapis.com/buzz/v1/activities/count?alt=json...

Qaiku (public API, needs authentication): http://www.qaiku.com/api/statuses/replies/byurl.json?externa...

thanks

http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com/ :)

Even http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com/http://g... has a few shares.

I use that on my HN mashup... http://hnfluence.com/

Also my nyt mashup... http://influentialtimes.com/

What API/URL do you use to get the bit.ly counts?

Probably the bit.ly API: http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation

That's the one. All the api's I'm using here return json. The only tricky part when dealing with these api's is making sure the json can be parsed, trapping errors, making sure variables exist before calling them... that kind of thing.

There is a guy at Yahoo that took a long list of news articles, etc and analyzed over 40MM "Likes" this way. Pretty cool charts came out of it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300300

This guy is me :)

Yuri Lifshits made an entertaining presentation at yesterday's SHDH with data from graph.facebook.com. Link: http://ediscope.labs.yahoo.net/.

That's exactly how I learned that you can use http://graph.facebook.com in this way!

For those of you who weren't at SHDH, you can see Yury's talk from last night here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/13439718 - his talk starts at 14:40.

Also, probably goes without saying, but this method includes JSONP support: http://graph.facebook.com/http://news.ycombinator.com/?callb...

Statistically speaking it would be flawed to use this to compare and prioritize a list of urls in order to rank them by interestingness/attention/etc.

The reason is that pages that have Facebook like buttons embedded on them are statistically speaking going to have a higher chance of getting shared than those that don't (such as Hacker News - which doesn't have such buttons).

I guess it depends what you might use this for, but to me it seems to only have limited value.

We've been doing that on Maemo News (http://maemo.org/news/) for a few years now. Works well, especially if you couple it with local, HN-style voting and assign a separate weight for each relevancy source

Does anyone know at what point your IP would get throttled? If so, any usage guidelines if you plan on analyzing a large url set?

Is their a way to see the specific names of each user who shared the URL on Facebook. For example, if a URL has been shared on Facebook through 9300 Users is it possible to get a list of all the users name(s) or is their a easy wat to see which users shared the url.