
A drop-in replacement for Twitter’s deactivated unofficial share count API - franze
http://opensharecount.com/
======
swang
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...](https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hard-decisions-for-a-sustainable-
platform)

~~~
mschenk
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...](http://tech.leadstories.com/140185-what-twitter-takes-away-
opensharecountcom-gives-you-back-the-share-counter.html)

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dtran
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](https://dev.twitter.com/rest/public/search)

~~~
mschenk
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.

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

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

[https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www...](https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www.washingtonpost.com)

"Sorry, that page does not exist"

~~~
minimaxir
_This will not work anymore after November 20th, 2015!_

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

