A command-line utility and Python library to access the social share counts for a particular URL.

Usage:
  socialshares <url> [<platforms>...] [options]

Options:
  -h, --help  Show this screen.
  -p, --plain  Plain output.
  -r <attempts>, --retry <attempts>  Retry fetching up to <attempt> times [default: 1]
  -e, --exit  Exit with an error code when not all counts could be fetched.

Some examples:

# fetch count for all supported platforms, 
# try again once (the default) for platforms that fail
$ socialshares http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

# fetch only facebook and twitter
$ socialshares http://www.theguardian.com/politics facebook twitter     --retry 2

Platforms are fetched in parallel and retried (once by default.) If no platforms are specified, just facebook and twitter will be returned.

By default, socialshares outputs JSON:

{
  "reddit": {
    "downs": 0, 
    "ups": 6
  }, 
  "google": 20, 
  "facebook": 1498, 
  "twitter": 300, 
  "pinterest": 1
}

Use the --plain flag if instead you'd like space-separated output.

$ socialshares http://www.theguardian.com/politics twitter
57

import socialshares
counts = socialshares.fetch(url, ['facebook', 'pinterest'])

pip install socialshares
# optionally, for asynchronous fetching
pip install grequests

If requests_futures and (for Python 2.x) futures are installed, social-shares will use these packages to speed up share count fetching, by accessing the various social media APIs in parallel.