Awesome

Social Shares

Social shares is intended to easily check social sharings of an url.

You can track how many times the url was shared in various social networks, such as facebook, twitter, etc. It can be useful for some kind landings with social mechanics or for tracking network activity of your content pages.

Supported networks

International:

facebook
google plus
~~twitter~~ Looking for another way, because API have been closed officially
reddit
linkedin
pinterest
stumbleupon
buffer

Russian:

Chinese:

weibo

Japanese:

hatebu

Basic usage

:000 > require 'social_shares'
 => true

:000 > url = 'http://www.apple.com/'
 => "http://www.apple.com/"

:000 > SocialShares.facebook url
 => 394927

:000 > SocialShares.google url
 => 28289

:000 > SocialShares.twitter url
 => 1164675

In case of exception:

:000 > SocialShares.twitter url
 => nil

:000 > SocialShares.twitter! url
  => RestClient::RequestTimeout: Request Timeout

Advanced usage

List of all supported networks:

:000 > SocialShares.supported_networks
 => [:vkontakte, :facebook, :google, :twitter, :mail_ru, :odnoklassniki, :reddit, :linkedin, :pinterest, :stumbleupon, :buffer]

Fetch all shares by one method (#all, #all!):

# in case of exception it will return nil
:000 > SocialShares.all url
 => {:vkontakte=>nil, :facebook=>399027, :google=>28346, :twitter=>1836, :mail_ru=>37, :odnoklassniki=>1, :reddit=>2361, :linkedin=>33, :pinterest=>21011, :stumbleupon=>43035, :weibo=>12760, :buffer=>1662}

# and this will raise it
:000 > SocialShares.all! url
 => RestClient::RequestTimeout: Request Timeout

Fetch shares by excluding networks(#omit, #omit!):

:000 > SocialShares.omit url, %w(facebook)
 => { :google=>28289, :linkedin=>nil, ... }

# same here
:000 > SocialShares.omit! url, %w(facebook)
 => RestClient::RequestTimeout: Request Timeout

Fetch shares of selected networks(#selected, #selected!):

:000 > SocialShares.selected url, %w(facebook google linkedin)
 => {:facebook=>394927, :google=>28289, :linkedin=>nil}

# same here
:000 > SocialShares.selected! url, %w(facebook google linkedin)
 => RestClient::RequestTimeout: Request Timeout

Total sum of sharings in selected networks:

:000 > SocialShares.total url, %w(facebook google)
 => 423216

# Second arg is optional, by default it takes all networks
:000 > SocialShares.total url
 => 1631102

Does any network have at least one link?

:000 > SocialShares.has_any? url, %w(facebook google)
 => true
# Second arg is optional, by default it takes all networks
:000 > SocialShares.has_any? url
 => true

Note that #has_any? is faster than (#total > 0), because it stops on first network that has at least 1 sharing

Configuring

You can specify timeout and open_timeout for each social network

SocialShares.config = {
  twitter: {timeout: 4, open_timeout: 7},
  facebook: {timeout: 10, open_timeout: 15}
}

:open_timeout is the timeout for opening the connection. This is useful if you are calling servers with slow or shaky response times. Default value is 3 seconds.
:timeout is the timeout for reading the answer. This is useful to make sure you will not get stuck half way in the reading process, or get stuck reading a 5 MB file when you're expecting 5 KB of JSON. Default value is 3 seconds.

If you use Rails, you can create file config/initializers/social_shares.rb and fill it with this config.

Try it by yourself before installation

Send request through shell to test numbers. Please do NOT use this url in your projects.

curl -X POST -d '{"url": "http://www.apple.com", "networks": ["facebook", "google", "reddit"]}' https://social-shares-api-cedar-14.herokuapp.com/

You will see:

{"facebook":312412,"google":46088,"reddit":114}

Installation

Include the gem in your Gemfile:

gem 'social_shares'

Contributing

Create provider class in lib/social_shares/foo.rb with method #shares!, that return Integer value. #checked_url is accessed attribute.

module SocialShares
  class Foo < Base
    def shares!
      response = RestClient.get(url)
      JSON.parse(response)["shares"] || 0
    end

  private

    def url
      "http://foo.com/?url=#{checked_url}"
    end
  end
end

Add it to lib/social_shares.rb

require 'social_shares/foo'
SUPPORTED_NETWORKS = [:foo, :vkontakte, :facebook]

Update README: add link to list, possible answer in #all method, etc.

Author

Timur Kozmenko - timraell@gmail.com