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Is there any way for people to share a URL with their friends on Facebook without affecting a globally-visible count? I have a real-estate site and homebuyers

by zach 16y ago

Is there any way for people to share a URL with their friends on Facebook without affecting a globally-visible count? I have a real-estate site and homebuyers have an incentive not to "tip off" anyone else who could end up bidding against them for a house. You can imagine the same is true for eBay items. But they would still like to share homes they're interested in on Facebook, among a small network. I put a Share link on our pages instead of one that would actually show the number of shares or likes. But of course, this information is very publicly available (e.g. the Shareaholic shows it for every page). To be honest, I don't presume it makes any sense for Facebook to support this kind of thing. They are naturally biased towards openness and would rather provide functionality to support that. And this is kind of a unique scenario. But on behalf of users of the personal web, I would love it if Facebook supported: <meta name="robots" content="nolinkcount">

dalore 16y ago
Can't they just share the url the normal way? Before all these services for sharing urls we used to just copy the url and send it via some text medium.
- zach 16y ago
  I think if you cut and paste the URL into the status box in the normal way, Facebook increments the share count. Maybe if you remove the link preview it doesn't, but I haven't tested it. I would just like users to be able to use Facebook to easily solicit opinion about a potential home. However, if clicking through a Share/Like button or merely pasting the URL into Facebook causes a global "this was shared" count to go up, users are doing something they might not want to, without even realizing it. I could already imagine that having Shareaholic running while looking at house listings is probably a good idea. Especially on listings for a home you're selling!
- thwarted 16y ago
  I much prefer a bookmarklet to sharing, because I control the content posted a little more and I don't need to rely on the website operator to recognize the social site I use as part of their either too-small (just Facebook and Twitter) or massive list of social networking sites (my bookmarklet is actually to share on Friendfeed, which all then gets imported into Facebook via the Facebook Friendfeed App. I do periodically use a Delicious bookmarklet also). If this increases the link count when it ends up showing up on Facebook, I don't know.

by zach 16y ago

dalore 16y ago

Can't they just share the url the normal way? Before all these services for sharing urls we used to just copy the url and send it via some text medium.

zach 16y ago
I think if you cut and paste the URL into the status box in the normal way, Facebook increments the share count. Maybe if you remove the link preview it doesn't, but I haven't tested it. I would just like users to be able to use Facebook to easily solicit opinion about a potential home. However, if clicking through a Share/Like button or merely pasting the URL into Facebook causes a global "this was shared" count to go up, users are doing something they might not want to, without even realizing it. I could already imagine that having Shareaholic running while looking at house listings is probably a good idea. Especially on listings for a home you're selling!
thwarted 16y ago
I much prefer a bookmarklet to sharing, because I control the content posted a little more and I don't need to rely on the website operator to recognize the social site I use as part of their either too-small (just Facebook and Twitter) or massive list of social networking sites (my bookmarklet is actually to share on Friendfeed, which all then gets imported into Facebook via the Facebook Friendfeed App. I do periodically use a Delicious bookmarklet also). If this increases the link count when it ends up showing up on Facebook, I don't know.