New and Improved fbShare.me Button

It’s been a little over a month since we first launched our sharecount button for Facebook and what a month it’s been. With very little promotion, our weekend coding project was quickly being served on over 5M pageviews per day. And now, Facebook has released an official version of their own.

As part of Facebook’s button release, they also announced a new API for pulling the share data directly from them. They were kind enough to give us a preview of this API, and we actually launched a new version of our button using the combined Facebook and awe.sm share data over the weekend. Here’s what’s new:

  • Uses combined share data from Facebook and awe.sm for the most complete stats
  • Cleaner look and slightly taller (9px) large button (it is now 53px wide by 69px tall)
  • Ability to customize the background and text colors of the badge in the large button
  • When there are no shares, the badge in the large button is clickable as a sharing interface

We also upgraded our WordPress Plugin to accommodate these changes and include some user requests:

  • Support color customization in plugin
  • Added the ability to disable the button from appearing on Pages (vs Posts)
  • Improved plugin performance by eliminating javascript

At this point, our version of the button is primarily targeted at existing awe.sm publishers. But, there are a few reasons other folks might want to use it over the Facebook version:

Please let us know if you have ideas on how we can make the button even more useful.

October 26, 2009 | Jonathan | Tags: , , , , , | 5 Comments »

The Facebook Sharecount Button

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.

September 21, 2009 | Jonathan | Tags: , | 9 Comments »