How to create sharing icons with the share count number showing?

Question

See a sample article on theonion.com

I know how to create icons for these sites without using their standard widget, but how did they get the number of share, bellow each icon ? Is there an API to ask for it ?

Answer 1

Twitter

use the URL :

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stackoverflow.com

It will return a JSON string :

{"count":8026,"url":"http:\/\/stackoverflow.com\/"}

Facebook

The URL is

http://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://www.google.com

But see stackoverflow.com/questions/5699270

Google +

The URL is

https://clients6.google.com/rpc?key=YOUR_API_KEY

More social sites at https://gist.github.com/2640302