New tweet buttons or goodbye counter

On November 20, Twitter turned off the ability to view the link counter via the private API of its buttons and removed the counter itself from their official design, which they warned about in their blog a little over a month ago. The new button will now look like this:

We are talking about the API, located at: cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json. Previously, by passing the desired url, you could get the number of tweets / retweets that contain a link to this url. From today, instead of the usual json, the API returns a 404 error.

Although the API was officially private, it was in no way limited in use and over the years of its existence managed to form the basis of many services involved in this or that data analysis.

Officially, Twitter connects this with the complexity of transferring functionality to a new platform, or rather, the low priority of this task, relative to others and convinces its users that the counter on the button does not play any special role for website visitors. However, this is the first time a large social network has refused a counter on its button.

It turned out that this change did not pass me by. I used the counter API as one of the main data sources for building a news rating on my Top.st service . Naturally, turning off the counter is likely to hit the quality of the selection, so you have to look for workarounds.

I suggest everyone not indifferent to express their opinion on this situation. Have you or your company been affected by disabling this service? If so, how did you use it and do you plan to collect this data in any other way? Is the counter on the “share” button important for you, as for the user, do you consider this data relevant?