We hadn’t really planned to announce this yet, but the cat is now out of the bag.
A few weeks back I decided to build a button for my blog that would give me the same functionality of ‘retweet’ buttons, like the ones from TweetMeme and Backtype (both of which support awe.sm by the way 
), for sharing on Facebook.
I built it in a weekend on top of our powerful Aggregate Data API, and then we decided some other folks might like it too. So, we put up a little splash page and started quietly asking people to test it. Mashable was the first major blog to launch it this past weekend, and were very helpful in providing feedback. You can now also find it live on The Next Web, and grab it for your own site at fbShare.me.
What it does:
- Displays the number of shares and on hover the total number of clicks for those shares (displays Facebook logo when 0 shares)
- Gives you a choice between a large or small button
- Tracks the shares from the button using your awe.sm API Key or fbShare.me links
- Allows you to add Google Analytics parameters to fbShare.me links
Please note, this is NOT an officially endorsed Facebook tool. It doesn’t have special access to secret Facebook APIs that tell you how many times a link has been shared on Facebook. The count and click numbers are only for share actions that happen via awe.sm. In addition to the shares that occur through the fbShare.me button, any that happen through other awe.sm-enabled sharing or syndication tools, like Sociable, AddToAny, and TweetPo.st, will also be counted.
We put this out there because we thought it was cool and hoped others would find it useful. It is also a great reference implementation for the kinds of valuable sharing tools that can be built on top of the awe.sm APIs. awe.sm is a social media campaign tracking platform for publishers, and we want to offer them the broadest selection of syndication and sharing tools possible. Our real value isn’t in building our own tools, it’s in helping the developers of the thousands of great tools out there offer publishers a way to connect those individual solutions together to form a cohesive system.
Our hope for fbShare.me is that it will inspire more great tools developers to incorporate awe.sm-powered functionality into what they’re building. So if you’re working on a social media syndication or sharing tool for publishers, please check out our APIs and feel free to drop us a line at developers [at] awe.sm.
you’re the man
[...] button was built as a weekend project on top of the company’s “Aggregate Data” API, which shows you anonymized, [...]
How do you get the fbshare.me button under the tweetmeme button? Mine keep popping up to the right of my tweetmeme button instead of under it.
Any help would be appreciated!
Is there a way to edit the placement of this button under the backtype (or in my case tweetmeme), like you have here if using the wordpress plugin versions?
Jason and Wes, the positioning is controlled by the Wrapper Style field in the plugin settings. You will need to use some basic CSS to get it to work correctly on your own blogs, but here’s what we use on this one:
float: left; margin-bottom: 65px; margin-right: 10px; position:relative; bottom: -65px;This is an incredibly awesome WP plugin. Love it. I’m going to work on adding it to all the newspaper staff blogs I administer soon.
Only one question: Is there a way to use the Facebook api to look at the link being posted and automatically populate the share window with some of that content — post title, excerpt, photo — so you’re sharing more than just a link and a comment?
Hi Ted, the behavior you describe (i.e. the title, preview image, and excerpt not showing up) is actually the result of an outage on the Facebook side (see http://bugs.developers.facebook.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7137). When Facebook is working as expected, the button already does behave in the manner you’re requesting.
I can certainly attest this is a great plugin for Wordpress, but I had a question about it’s appearance. I’m working with a dark theme and wanted the “share” button to use a white background, just like you’re using here. I was curious how you did that. Thanks and again, great plugin!
[...] Comments Mark on The Facebook Sharecount Buttonjonathanhstrauss on The Facebook Sharecount Buttonjonathanhstrauss on The Facebook Sharecount [...]