Clarification about share counts for the new Tweet button

[ThriveThemes]

I’d love to see more transparency about this. A specific date for the change would be good to know, as well as an explanation of why this decision was made.

I also want to add that I wouldn’t have an issue with paying for access to this data, as long as we get good data and the price is reasonable. I was in contact with the GNIP team about it and it seems that they can’t offer full share counts and the limited data they can offer comes at a price that makes no sense for our kind of use case.

Make it easier for developers to give you money, please.

[Anderson760]

The suggestions they have for using the twitter/search and streaming api’s aren’t sufficient. twitter/search doesn’t recall many tweets and streaming api’s are locked down to some extent. Has anyone found a reasonable alternative?

[FrancoisM]

Strongly agree, this is an insanely bad move. Gonna kill businesses…

[appscreo]

@Anderson760 Unfortunately as @ThriveThemes write above there will be no alternative way to collect shared data. Even GNIP cannot offer it and price for access to partial data is very high for regular users and start up companies.

During our tests we made with Twitter REST API and Streaming API we did not find a way to collect number of Tweets where particular address is present (like it is displayed now). Many Tweets and almost every Retweet did not appear in search. You cannot imagine what is the amount of downloaded data to take a simple counter statistical value - you need to get all tweets from search API with entire data and as we write above and this is done with max of 100 records per call.

If someone made to find a way to gather that data from Twitter API please share it with the community

[andypiper]

I’d love to see more transparency about this. A specific date for the change would be good to know, as well as an explanation of why this decision was made.

We’ve recently updated the developer blog with some more information on the infrastructure changes that led to the choices here.

[pj_costello]

“The count was built in a time where the only button on the web was from Twitter. Today, it’s most commonly placed among a number of other share buttons, few of which have counts” (from https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hard-decisions-for-a-sustainable-platform)

Few of which have counts??? Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and G+ all provide share counts. These are the primary networks displayed across digital content, whether a small blog post, a product page, or articles by top publishers.

Twitter is simply out of touch with things with this perspective.

[DustinWStout]

Yep-- I’m calling BS on the “many of them don’t have share counts” line. You’ve just fed yourselves more backlash and less credibility with the community that supports Twitter most.

And who are these “Several top customers” you speak of? How will those several top customers react when all the major influencers they’re looking to reach on Twitter decide to stop using it because Twitter is acting against their best interests?

Influential users understand the power of social proof on their sites-- you take that away and Twitter becomes a less important piece of their site. Couple that with the fact that the other social share buttons DO show counts, it makes Twitter a counter-active social proof that is easily discarded from the website altogether.

Some of my plugin’s users get in the hundreds of millions of unique visitors and they’ve tested this social proof theory. No counts = less shares = less traffic = bad for business.

[andypiper]

We’ve been totally transparent about the underlying technical reasons for this deprecation, and been honest with you about the fact that the endpoint was never a supported and public part of the API.

We regret that some of our users and partners are frustrated at this change, but these are the facts behind it, and what led to our decision to make this change.

We appreciate the frustration, but the referenced blog post lays out the background to the change, that we previously described in the redesign post.

[DustinWStout]

My team and I are doing more research, but from our knowledge there’s a number of misrepresentations your article makes:

• Many developers recall Twitter saying that they had plans to make public endpoints available.
• I don’t believe the Tweet button was the only one around back then.
• The other buttons generally displayed on websites do have share counts.

If it’s simply a matter of “We don’t have the resources to maintain or improve what’s currently in place” then just say that. That would be transparency. That might yield a response from the community that would likely rally behind rather than lash out against the company.

Why not ask for help or partner with third-party developers to find a solution rather than just saying “sorry, we can’t afford this, so say goodbye to it.”

Does Twitter realize how many developers/companies relied on that data? Did they consider how it might affect those of us who have integrated it into our products and/or business model?

[Bla08827012]

Hey, I’m new to twitter developing and doing some stuff at university with the Streaming API. Will these changes somehow effect the Streaming API?

[andypiper]

No, there is no impact on the Streaming API whatsoever.

[gokulns]

Hi Andy,

After the closure of the undocumented, open endpoint, will there be any other endpoints that’ll allow developers to retrieve the count data for particular URLs? It’d be incredibly useful for everyone who builds stuff on top of Twitter.

Cheers,
Gokul.

[andypiper]

There is no plan for a single API endpoint that replicates this functionality, per our blog post outlining the reasons for the removal.

[ApexContestPrep]

I hope twitter does something about this. I just noticed today not only the 100’s of re-tweets I had on my counter for latest post on twitter were gone, but ALL my share counts for Facebook & linked in also were reset to 0. This is a huge inconvenience for my site.

[andypiper]

I’m afraid we can’t help with share counts for any other sites or platforms. We will be retiring the infrastructure that currently serves the counter for our own sharing buttons, and that’s the reason for this change.

[pipdig]

Just to throw in a platform specific viewpoint…

This is going cause a lot of issues with WordPress theme/plugin development. It is very unlikely that an end user is going to pay extra just to have a count on Twitter, when Facebook and Pinterest offer it for free. They will either opt to remove sharing counts entirely (it’s one of our most requested features during web development, especially for YouTubers and alike who LIVE for a good ol’ share/view count) or remove Twitter from the list (which surely makes Twitter look pretty cruddy in comparison?).

Even the official WP Jetpack uses this count source, so I’m assuming wordpress.com will also do the same. That’s millions of sites this will hit.

[jsbullockdotnet]

Thanks @DustinWStout for starting and pushing this subject.

I’ve been developing a project that relies on this API for most of the year, and am frustrated, dismayed to catch up on the latest developments and am weighing in here.

Sorry, but I have comment that allot of the twitter responses here and the ‘hard decisions’ blog post itself wreaks of a bad case of corporate myopia.

1. "Rebuilding has its own costs, and would delay our work on other, more impactful offerings for our developer community."
   Are you really confident you have something more impactful up your sleeve after getting this much negative response to this decision?

2. "It doesn’t count replies, quote Tweets, variants of your URLs, nor does it reflect the fact that some people Tweeting these URLs might have many more followers than others."
   This does NOT negate the share count as at least basic gauge of share metrics (especially for marketers operating on your platform); while they’ve also pointed out that they’ve been sitting on their hands for years not achieving anything listed (again, for the marketers operating on your platform).

3. You are discontinuing an API that is relied upon, without a replacement, for the sake of new fancy hipster designed buttons, and your shareholders. That’d be transparency.

A quote from Bill Roth from another blog post about this topic which is pretty poignant: “It’s about becoming the real time media platform of the 21st century, not giving 7 billion people each equal voice just for the sake of it.”

Is Twitter Seriously Removing Share Counts? Why?!

[DustinWStout]

I agree wholeheartedly. And thanks for sharing our blog post. (Co-founder of Warfare Plugins)

[mylogoisgreat]

This decision is unbelievable. The share counts was such a basic thing.
Just think about youtube removing total view count for a video.
This about facebook not showing like counts for websites or fanpages
What if twitter doesnt show follower count as well.
Can you ever think of that!
Why? why? why?

[niall]