an API for retrieving share counts?

[Laurent-Walter Goix]

hello all,

i was wondering if you are aware of any API that allows to retrieve
the number of shares of a given URI. I could see this as very closely
related to the current OExchange spec as a sort of dual API.

if this does not exist so far would anybody be interested in
specifying it here?
How about creating a w3c community group to "slowly" move to a w3c
spec to may foster the adoption of oexchange?

any feedback is welcome
walter

[elf Pavlik]

Excerpts from Laurent-Walter Goix's message of 2012-08-08 09:26:27 +0000:

sounds to me that it might require some kind of pingback service... IMO very useful feature you ask for with tracking shares :)

~ elf pavlik ~

[Charlie Reverte]

We (AddThis) have a sharecount API as part of our product, I'm happy to share some lessons learned in terms of normalizing urls (use rel/canonical!) and serving counts.  Backend aggregation across sharing services is a big problem (which we don't solve) and the definition of what constitutes a "share" can be inconsistent across platforms.  If you count retweets as shares, would you also count comments on facebook posts that broaden the group of people who can see a posted url?  Interesting questions..

C*

[Laurent-Walter Goix]

Interesting indeed!

Could you share some more on this API? Would you have any interest in
making it available in an open spec?

in can understand that it may be difficult in a distributed scenario
to gather all the counts on that URL from various services but i don't
think this is needed for now. basically it only would need to retrieve
the count for that service.
imo the "counts" should only reflect first-party sharing, not
including comments on that URL. but i can understand that
implementations may have their own understand of it and this is
probably fair. to me retweets and re-shares (fb) would count like a
first-party activity.

walter