I wrote this little script that grabs the count of shares on popular social networks, using their APIs. I have listed the documentation on the project page on Github. I will copy the relevant pieces of readme here.

Social Network APIs

Facebook

Request: https://graph.facebook.com/?id=https://www.github.com

Response:

{
   "id": "http://www.github.com",
   "shares": 31684
}

Twitter

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

Response:

{"count":14,"url":"http:\/\/github.com\/"}

Google Plus

Request: https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/fastbutton?url=https://github.com

This returns the +1 button. I extracted the counts using regex window.__SSR = {c: ([\d]+)

LinkedIn

Request: http://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=https://github.com&format=json

Response:

{"count":0,"fCnt":"0","fCntPlusOne":"1","url":"https:\/\/github.com"}

StumbleUpon

Request: http://www.stumbleupon.com/services/1.01/badge.getinfo?url=https://github.com

Response too large.

Pinterest

Request: http://api.pinterest.com/v1/urls/count.json?url=https://github.com

Response:

receiveCount({"url":"https://github.com","count":0})

Reddit

Request: http://www.reddit.com/api/info.json?url=https://github.com

This returns a lot of data, which can be easily used to extracted counts. Note that the Reddit guys don’t really like automated requests and may cause the call to return HTTP 429.

Vkontakte

Request: https://vk.com/share.php?act=count&index=1&url=https://github.com

Response:

VK.Share.count(1, 419);

This marks the end of the documentation. I hope that serves some purpose. The reason I wrote this was that I wanted social sharing buttons on this blog. I could not afford any of the mainstream buttons like Addthis and Sharethis. They kill the load time, and I’m already struggling with Disqus and Adsense overload. More on that soon. I hope to create a ‘dynamic looking’ static set of buttons for this blog, and I’ll update you if I get time to complete it.