CODEWITHSUNDEEP
apitwitter
user2297996
user2297996

Reputation: 1564

Official way to fetch the number of tweets for a URL

Twitter has private endpoints like this one:

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json

Tweet counts can be fetched from here, but this is not recommended by Twitter. Besides, they keep saying they gonna shut down these endpoints in the near future.

The Site Streams API is now in closed beta, they don't accept applications.

https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/sitestreams

So that leaves is with only one option, the REST API, but I don't see any endpoint there which could return the number of tweets for a given URL.

What's the best way to get this data? Is there an "official" endpoint for this?

Or the only way is to use something like the Public stream API or the REST API search endpoints and filter the results?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4149

Answers (1)

And Finally
And Finally

Reputation: 5704

The private endpoint will be shut down by 20 Nov and there'll be nothing to replace it. This blog post from Twitter explains the background: apparently it's to do with their move to their new "real-time, multi-tenant distributed database" system codenamed Manhattan.

The REST API will be of limited use for this purpose. You'd have to do a search for your URL, collect each page of results and add up the total number of tweets yourself. For example this request

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/search/tweets.json?q=metro.co.uk&count=100

will get tweets associated with http://metro.co.uk. (It won't work if you just paste this into your browser - you have to authenticate first. You can try this on the Twitter API console tool.) But the Search API returns a max of 100 tweets per page of results, and it only returns tweets from the last 7 days.

It seems the only solution (explained here) is an elaborate one using a Twitter Streaming API. Basically you'd have to create your own app to count relevant tweets. It would open a connection to stream.twitter.com passing your URL as a track parameter. Twitter will return a tweet every time anyone tweets the address, and your app will have to count them. The example given in that post is:

curl -u user:password "https://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.json" -d "track=https%3A%2F%2Fdev.twitter.com%2Fdiscussions%2F5653"

I'm not sure how you would deal with shortened URLs in this scenario.

This change has meant that third-party services like SharedCount that report a count of Twitter shares are having to stop offering that data. Sorry to give you bad news - I'm really disappointed with this situation myself. It seems crazy that we can't just get a total of tweets for a given URL.

You can find a little bit more about this in this thread.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions