Twitter has decided they don’t want incur the cost to continue to provide the API necessary for Social Share plug-in developers to include a “count” of how many times your blog was posted on Twitter. The official pull date was November 20th.
This article starts with the sad story of how and when they made this unfortunate decision.
They explained their decision with a blog post called: Hard Decisions for a Sustainable Platform
Simple Share Buttons Plus a WordPress social sharing plug-in that I recommend.“The mechanism by which we count Tweet shares today relies on using Cassandra. As part of our ongoing effort to consolidate and simplify the platform for supportability, we’re completing our migration away from Cassandra, in favor of Manhattan, our real-time, multi-tenant distributed database for Twitter scale. The Tweet count feature is one of the last features running on Cassandra. Like all engineering organizations, we have to make tradeoffs. The choices are to deprecate the feature, or rebuild it on a more modern tech stack. Rebuilding has its own costs, and would delay our work on other, more impactful offerings for our developer community. After talking to several of the top customers affected, we chose to not continue the feature.”
The tweet count deprecation should hit ALL social share plugins including Simple Share Buttons, Social WarFare, SumoMe, Monarch and Easy Social Share.
Social Warfare recently published their second post on the deprecation topic called: What Social Warfare is Doing About Your Twitter Share Count.
This was their first post: Is Twitter Seriously Removing Share Counts. Why Would They Do This?
David Neal has already sent out an update to his Simple Share Buttons plug-in to accommodate this.
I delayed doing the update to allow myself my Twitter counts until right before they are gone.
Simple Share Buttons Plus on BoomerTechTalk.com
Twitter recently apologized to developers and is trying to hit the reset button as reported in TechCrunch.
This deprecation hardly builds trust.
Furor from the Twitter community about the deprecation running from September 23rd to November 1st.
Solutions Twitter Social Share Count. Here are Your Options:
Check out TwitCount!
Their Twitter account is: @twitcountapp.
I found Ann Smarty’s valuable post thanks to GooglePlus.
Hers is the newest and most valuable summary of solution options I have found to date:
Internet Marketing Ninja’s Ann Smarty December 14
Social Media Today November 19: What Are Your Options?
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/what-happens-when-twitter-switches-share-counts-and-what-are-your-options
Search Engine Watch November 23rd by Charles Lake
Open Share Count: opensharecount.com – I have not vetted this. Don’t use it without checking it out first.
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