Can we count how many times an item has been shared in Google Reader?

Question

This is related to recent "Google Buzz Count" feature on famous blog Mashable - http://mashable.com/2010/02/12/google-buzz-buttons-count/

While trying to dig into logic they are using for "Google Buzz Count", I somehow reached to the conclusion that, essentially, they are counting how many times an item has been shared in Google Reader?

I googled rest of the web but everywhere they are saying that there is no way to count how many times an item has been shared in Google Reader?

One more thing I noticed on Mashable is that they r using PHP (server side scripting) for "buzz counting", as opposed to javascript based twitter-(meme)-count and/or facebook-share-count. Reason for using PHP could be protecting their code from being reversed engineered or simply fooling around people (in some test just clicking on link increased count - may be unique click counting is fetched by using bit.ly API in this case)

Just curious!

-Rahul

Answer 1

As far as I understand it, Mashable does not use the Google Reader's shared items feature to actually count the amount of shares, but just to share the link. Later on they explain (as you mentioned yourself) that they use click counting and bit.ly services to display the counter as Google does not provide access to the counts yet.

Today we added counters and tracking to our buttons, running the clicks through URL shortener Bit.ly so we can display the share counts. It’s not the perfect solution, but it’s a temporary step until Google decides to support such implementations officially.