How can I get the number of Tweets a link has using the Twitter API?

Question

I want to see how many tweets does a link have. For Facebook, you can use FQL to get the number of Likes each page has.

Is there a page in the Twitter API documentations that describe how to do this?

Answer 1

This seems to work, without authentication:

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=example.com

For example, to get the number of tweets for this random page on mashable:

http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2F2012%2F01%2F21%2Ftop-10-tech-this-week-13

Returns the following JSON:

{"count":1204,"url":"http://mashable.com/2012/01/21/top-10-tech-this-week-13/"}