Is http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json? a valid way to get the tweet count for a URL?

[jonjhiggins]

Brilliant, thank you for the example

[tonariman]

Hi Taylor;

I’m trying to understand the rationale behind this recommendation.

What should be a relatively simple problem has been flipped on its head and turned into a massively complicated undertaking. For apps that track hundreds/thousands of accounts, it’s not practical to use the Streaming API (limited predicates) to track URL tweets and retweets, you’d only be able to measure 400 at a time. If you processed in batches, you’d have gaps in data/accuracy. Site Streams + Control Streams is overkill and would only include mentions of the URL by users or their followers. The only solution that works reliably is if you sent the aggregate count alongside the URL in the Streaming API response, as is done with the retweet_count.

This is a number that twitter has already processed… why not expose it? Why force every client to redo the work? This imposes a drastic toll (storage, processing, connectivity complexity) on not only the client but on twitter and the network too. Where’s the benefit?

Regards,
N.

[tkeyling]

@tonariman Good point! I don´t get that, too. Another point regarding the reliability of the tweet-count is, that some domains are systematically ignored, f.e. almost all NYTimes-Articles. For those, you can querry the tweets from topsy (on the other hand, topsy’s stats won´t show tweets for the most cnn.com articles, but Twitter API does). Is there an somehow official constraint for some urls like nyt?
Greetings,
T.

[claytonbolz]

We also need this feature available in the APIs. We do a similar thing to collect the Facebook like counts and Facebook provides a simple REST call we can do, plus batch 20-50 URLs in the HTTP request which reduces a lot of network traffic and load. Twitter definitely needs this as well.

It doesn’t make sense to stream each URL and manually collect the retweets, it’s not scalable. Is there a place were we can add this as a feature request?

[Joan_Artes]

And we can use cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json to retrieve the count? Like this way -> http://joelb.me/blog/2012/tutorial-creating-a-custom-tweet-button-with-counter/

[episod]

It’s a known desire that you want this data. At this time, usage of the http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json API directly is s
till forbidden. The only valid source of this data for third parties is if you derive it yourself at this time. You should just consider it data unavailable to you at this time if the means available to you is unscalable for you to track.

[sara_mose]

So you are saying that any developer who uses the API directly on a users account, without their knowledge and does things like change passwords and direct all their personal phone calls ans text messages through google voice, and intercepts all their emails before sending some - but perhaps not all - to the intended recipient using google, twitter and Facebook development tools, are you saying that the developer knows that what they are doing is wrong? Because that’s pretty much how I feel, being the recipient of this treatment, I find it fascinating to hear it said that developers know they are doing something very wrong. Interesting topic.

[sara_mose]

And as a programmer myself who did batch development fo hundreds of thousands of customers, your answer makes perfect sense. It’s completely illogical for what the tool was designed for. Look at the problem differently though, if you were not interested in hundreds or thousands of users, but just a very few, doesn’t the question now make sense?

[episod]

I don’t follow what you’re saying or the relation of that to an undocumented endpoint?

[sara_mose]

For the record the answer to the question, or at least how it was answered just now for me personally, is simply knock the user out of Twitter and lock them out until you get what you want.

[Joan_Artes]

I’m using the API that uses the your widget.js: http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json

What’s the difference between http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json and http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json ?

[sara_mose]

You probably don’t understand because I’m not a twitter developer, so the better question is, why is my personal twitter ID able to get into this development site? It’s what I have been asking myself. Enough on this topic, though, don’t want to take up too much of your time on my first time here. Many thanks.
mosey78@gmail.com

[episod]

They are effectively one and the same.

[episod]

Twitter developers use their own Twitter logins and passwords to log into this site and discuss the API & platform. If you want to cease getting any emails from this developer’s site, you can address your settings at [alias:/user].

[Joan_Artes]

Ok. Thanks.

[sara_mose]

So you really aren’t concerned about the programming being developed and approved here - by you- and what you are aware of right now that should want you to protect your development rights, you are really just not wanting me to be inconvenienced? Gotcha. I’m glad everything is so well documented, very nice coding standards as far as that goes. You have my email. Enough said.

[ItTakesBallsTo]

Sara, you should try re-reading what you’ve written before posting it. It has come to my attention that every single one of your posts here is extremely confusing and hard to follow. I’m just getting a basic “I’m angry” vibe from your posts… Other than that they are pretty much just you blabbering.

[lgedeon]

Does the 1.1 API change any of this? Specifically, are we able to get number of times a url was shared and cache it? 20 api calls per page load just to get counts would really drag the site down.

[divjot94]

Is there a quick and easy way to get tweet count? Why can’t we have something similar to http://graph.facebook.com/http://twitter.com , which works on cross domain as well?

Also , I tried the method mentioned by @Joan_Artes
And we can use cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json to retrieve the count? Like this way -> http://joelb.me/blog/2012/tutorial-creating-a-custom-tweet-button-with-counter/
But I guess it doesn’t work now.

Please help me in getting tweet count from my domain with a simple ajax call , and if it is not possible then is there any third party api which does that ?

[episod]

This is not a feature offered or documented in the API.