See how many times a URL has been shared on Facebook(graph.facebook.com)

305 pointsby jfvor 15 Jahren55 comments

graph.facebook.com

See how many times a URL has been shared on Facebook

http://graph.facebook.com/http://news.ycombinator.com

29 comments

jsdaltonvor 15 Jahren

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.

yahelcvor 15 Jahren

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.

jsdaltonvor 15 Jahren

> 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...

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

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

yahelcvor 15 Jahren

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.

bravuravor 15 Jahren

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.

vitovitovor 15 Jahren

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

hammockvor 15 Jahren

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,

yahelcvor 15 Jahren

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

scorpion032vor 15 Jahren

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

abrahamvor 15 Jahren

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

Which is also a public API.

ImJasonHvor 15 Jahren

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

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

subwayvor 15 Jahren

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

Aarononthewebvor 15 Jahren

Thanks for sharing these - tremendously helpful!

bergievor 15 Jahren

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

NathanCvor 15 Jahren

thanks

sewerhorsevor 15 Jahren

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

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

sicularsvor 15 Jahren

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

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

marcuskazvor 15 Jahren

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

seancronvor 15 Jahren

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

sicularsvor 15 Jahren

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.

hammockvor 15 Jahren

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

yurylifshitsvor 15 Jahren

This guy is me :)

luciferousvor 15 Jahren

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

jfvor 15 Jahren

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.

yahelcvor 15 Jahren

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

dotBenvor 15 Jahren

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.

bergievor 15 Jahren

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

minouyevor 15 Jahren

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?

bobmarley420vor 15 Jahren

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.

abavavor 15 Jahren