How to get number of likes from facebook like button?

Question

How to get number of likes from facebook like button? Is there any possible way to do this?

Answer 1

There are two ways to get the number of facebook likes.

1. Graph API

http://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http%3a%2f%2ffacebook.com

Result is JSON: (For some reason 'likes' are called 'shares')

{
   "http://facebook.com": {
      "id": "http://facebook.com",
      "shares": 35641554,
      "comments": 339
   }
}

2. FQL

http://api.facebook.com/method/fql.query?query=select+total_count+from+link_stat+where+url="http://facebook.com"'

Result:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<fql_query_response xmlns="http://api.facebook.com/1.0/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" list="true">
  <link_stat>
    <total_count>35641554</total_count>
  </link_stat>
</fql_query_response>