Recently, I’ve played with Twitter button to study it’s counting behaviour and got quite a confusing numbers. Didn’t find any details which might explain it so decided to ask here:
Firstly, I wanted to find out if the posted URL is normalized for the counting purpose. For example:
- Are the following 4 urls counted separately?
http://www.abc.com/page.html
http://www.abc.com/page.html?jkwi=ref&mmm=1260&wow=true
http://www.abc.com/page.html?mmm=1260&wow=true&jkwi=ref
http://www.abc.com/page.html?jkwi=ref
- It seems that query params are somehow sorted as ajax call for (jkwi=ref&mmm=1260&wow=true and mmm=1260&wow=true&jkwi=ref) reply will returns the same url value
twttr.receiveCount({“count”:5,“url”:“http://www.abc.com/page.html/?jkwi=ref&mmm=1260&wow=true”})
however, changing order of the URL params returns different count. After a while (probably when cache clears) they become equal.
Beyond the URL normalization I have some other observations as well:
-
From my tests I discovered that first tweet will result in counter showing 2 or 3 and this remains constant with the time
-
Sometimes following a tweet of an url, the count of the twitter button goes down to 0, after a while and refresh of the page the count starts to show correct number
Note: in all above tests the tweets are done directly via twitter.com and not via the button
