So I have a feeling that starting next month they're basically gimping their API on purpose to drive developers toward GNIP, which they bought last year for $134 million. Developers who can afford it anyway, because GNIP is not cheap.
Twitter is now cancelling that endpoint (on 11/20) and recommending for thousands of developers to switch to their streams API for the functionality, which requires a program to maintain a constant socket connection and listen for filtered URLs to show up. Which, sure, that's a reasonable architecture for some cases.
However, what used to be a simple API-query-for-a-known-URL is now going to be a daemon program running 24/7 for months and months that listens to all of twitter for all conversations about the base domain, and then tries to emulate a count.
If you're talking about switching to the free streams Twitter provides, good luck if you want to maintain a URL count for more than a handful of URLs. Streams actually IS the right product for what I wanted to do, but the limits are so low (I could maintain ~12 connections from a single IP) that I couldn't use it. They do have a site stream that would fit, but that's been in closed beta since it came out (2012 IIRC?) that is no longer accepting invitations and, according to the responses on their dev forums, is unlikely to be extended.
There is a popular twitter API endpoint which is undocumented and unsupported, yet insanely popular due to its functionality. It's the tweet-count-for-URL one; ex: https://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://www...
Twitter is now cancelling that endpoint (on 11/20) and recommending for thousands of developers to switch to their streams API for the functionality, which requires a program to maintain a constant socket connection and listen for filtered URLs to show up. Which, sure, that's a reasonable architecture for some cases.
However, what used to be a simple API-query-for-a-known-URL is now going to be a daemon program running 24/7 for months and months that listens to all of twitter for all conversations about the base domain, and then tries to emulate a count.