
See how many times a URL has been shared on Facebook - jf
http://graph.facebook.com/http://news.ycombinator.com
======
jsdalton
Twitter:
[http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://new...](http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://news.ycombinator.com)

LinkedIn: [http://www.linkedin.com/cws/share-
count?url=http://news.ycom...](http://www.linkedin.com/cws/share-
count?url=http://news.ycombinator.com)

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

~~~
yahelc
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
> 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://news.ycombinator.com)

[http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://new...](http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://news.ycombinator.com/)

[http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://new...](http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://news.ycombinator.com#foo)

~~~
yahelc
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
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...](http://graph.facebook.com/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB8nV453mTc)
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.

------
sewerhorse
<http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com/> :)

Even
[http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com/http://g...](http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com/)
has a few shares.

------
siculars
I use that on my HN mashup... <http://hnfluence.com/>

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

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

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

~~~
siculars
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
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
This guy is me :)

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

~~~
jf
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
Also, probably goes without saying, but this method includes JSONP support:
[http://graph.facebook.com/http://news.ycombinator.com/?callb...](http://graph.facebook.com/http://news.ycombinator.com/?callback=foo)

------
dotBen
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
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
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
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
see also <http://linkstore.ru/fbstat>

------
bergie
Here is a PHP lib for getting these counts across quite a few services:
[https://github.com/nemein/com_meego_planet/blob/master/calcu...](https://github.com/nemein/com_meego_planet/blob/master/calculate.php)

~~~
bergie
Quick usage example:
[http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/calculate_the_impact_of_your_posts...](http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/calculate_the_impact_of_your_posts/)

------
jtesp
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
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
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...](http://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://news.ycombinator.com,http://google.com)

To lookup multiple urls at the same time.

------
zaidf
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.

~~~
matclayton
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
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
Typos even have some shares, too:

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

------
michaelcgorman
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...](http://graph.facebook.com/http://www.twitter.com/#!michaelcgorman/)

~~~
TomasSedovic
You must encode it properly:

[http://graph.facebook.com/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.twitter.com%2F%23...](http://graph.facebook.com/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.twitter.com%2F%23!michaelcgorman%2F)

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.

------
pippy
<http://graph.facebook.com/http://presentcat.com>

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

My site is more popular than HN :D

------
kmander
Another mini-app to show this and other FB sharing data:
<http://www.keithmander.com/temp/socialabacus/>

Much like the others posted here, but a bit more AJAX and cute graphics.

------
necolas
See how many times a URL has been tweeted on Twitter:
[http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://new...](http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://news.ycombinator.com)

------
groaner
Clearly their censorship efforts have failed:

<http://graph.facebook.com/http://lamebook.com>

~~~
jacobbijani
hah, I've had lamespace.com for years (like, when MySpace was still relevant)
but don't use it for anything.

------
ski2mi
Meta! <http://graph.facebook.com/http://www.facebook.com>

~~~
texec
Real meta! <http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com>

~~~
pizza
Too meta
[http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com/http://g...](http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com/http://graph.facebook.com)

------
fibonacci1
Facebook: <http://graph.facebook.com/http://facebook.com>

------
hentenren
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2349290>

------
tews
Is this possible to see if URL was shared/liked by currently signed in
facebook user?

------
sinaiman
Does this only count public posts that "everyone" can see?

