See how many times a URL has been shared on Facebook

jsdalton · on March 20, 2011

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.

yahelc · on March 20, 2011

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.

jsdalton · on March 20, 2011

> 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...

yahelc · on March 20, 2011

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.

bravura · on March 21, 2011

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.

vitovito · on March 21, 2011

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

hammock · on March 20, 2011

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,

yahelc · on March 21, 2011

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

scorpion032 · on March 21, 2011

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

abraham · on March 21, 2011

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

Which is also a public API.

ImJasonH · on March 21, 2011

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

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

subway · on March 21, 2011

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

Aaronontheweb · on March 20, 2011

Thanks for sharing these - tremendously helpful!

bergie · on March 21, 2011

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

NathanC · on March 29, 2011

thanks

sewerhorse · on March 20, 2011

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

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

siculars · on March 20, 2011

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

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

marcuskaz · on March 21, 2011

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

seancron · on March 21, 2011

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

siculars · on March 21, 2011

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.

hammock · on March 20, 2011

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

yurylifshits · on March 24, 2011

This guy is me :)

luciferous · on March 20, 2011

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

jf · on March 21, 2011

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.

yahelc · on March 20, 2011

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

dotBen · on March 20, 2011

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.

bergie · on March 21, 2011

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

minouye · on March 21, 2011

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?

bobmarley420 · on March 29, 2011

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.

abava · on March 20, 2011

see also http://linkstore.ru/fbstat

bergie · on March 21, 2011

Here is a PHP lib for getting these counts across quite a few services: https://github.com/nemein/com_meego_planet/blob/master/calcu...

bergie · on March 21, 2011

Quick usage example: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/calculate_the_impact_of_your_posts...

jtesp · on March 21, 2011

Nice find. Facebook should have a morning paper about all of the changes & additions they make. They never seem to stick to any one way of doing anything and drive developers nuts!

bobmarley420 · on March 29, 2011

Is their a way to see the specific names of each user who shared the URL on Facebook. For example, I have a Youtube URL that has been shared on Facebook through 9300 Users. Therefore is it possible to view the names of the 9300 users? When I right click the link on Facebook it directs me straight to the Youtube link and when i click see more it only shows the most recent 20 People who have shared the link out of the total 9300.

matclayton · on March 20, 2011

It's a shortcut for http://graph.facebook.com/?id=abc

Looks like fb made opengraph pages first class citizens on their namespace, should be interesting to see what else they get soon,

You can also do http://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://news.ycombinator.com,h...

To lookup multiple urls at the same time.

zaidf · on March 20, 2011

Is there a way to get sum of the share count for all pages in a domain?

This one only reflects share count of the specific page--or only the homepage if you pass a domain.

terryjsmith · on March 20, 2011

We're working on this: http://www.jaxified.com/. Right now we're focused on blogs since it's easy to see new content, but we're working on adding support for static sites as well.

matclayton · on March 20, 2011

Add the domain to facebook.com/insights and then you can download an excel spreadsheet with the daily totals, just sum these to get the total shares/likes for a domain

jeffwidman · on March 20, 2011

And if you want to parse the Insights data into pretty pictures and graphs that are easier to analyse than raw data, sign up for our private beta at PageLever.com.

alecperkins · on March 20, 2011

Typos even have some shares, too:

http://graph.facebook.com/http://www,google.com

michaelcgorman · on March 20, 2011

Looks like hashbangs mess up the counting; e.g. http://graph.facebook.com/http://www.twitter.com/ and http://graph.facebook.com/http://www.twitter.com/#!michaelcg...

TomasSedovic · on March 20, 2011

You must encode it properly:

http://graph.facebook.com/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.twitter.com%2F%23...

Note that encoding '#' as %23 is sufficient.

However, it doesn't show any shares and I'm not sure if that means nobody shared your twitter URL on facebook or if there's another problem somewhere.