i have added a new feature to my test version of this here. now the counts of shares to each service are shown for each page - using the service provided by this england based group:

http://www.aljtmedia.com/blog/getting-your-social-share-counts-with-php/

it works fine, though i haven't tested this under load yet.

as far as privacy is concerned - using an aggregator service as i am doing here, does theoretically bypass the issue of these various social networks tracking the traffic on your site - however, now this other 3rd party can collate traffic across all the various services - theoretically putting them in an even more effective 'position' to monitor your site's traffic than any of the individual social networks would be on their own. on the upside, there is still no javascript being loaded by this plugin.
if anyone has any thoughts on how to improve this, then let me know. thanks.

i have seen that this aggregator service has a quota limit in place (which was not revealed in the page for the service) - so i am going to code the count retrieval process directly into this plugin. this will be done via php, rather than javascript. this allows me to cache the values - which prevents data leakage, since the targetted social sites that are being queried for the share counts will not be privy to the full traffic data for the elgg site - they will not see any more data than they would do as a result of a user manually sharing a page via their own page from within the targetted social site.

the only challenge is knowing the most efficient way to store the share counts for each page. as far as i am aware, there is no guaranteed object in the elgg database for pages, since - for example - pages can be created from within a plugin and not registered as an elgg object. therefore, the count data needs to be stored some other way.

the only solution that i can see working here is to have a new entity type created for this interconnected plugin - to store sharing data. however, that would mean creating a table with 1 row for every page on the elgg site. i am not aware of this existing elsewhere in elgg, so i think this may be a not-so-great idea. does anyone have any thoughts on the best solution for this? 

Is it possible to notify the owner of the content shared that their content has been shared?

Ex. Your Image 483948 was just shared on twitter

Thanks

notifications via sites that support @name_ids like twitter does, could be done by inserting the name of the content owner into the sharing message - this would require that the content owner on the elgg site has already input their own twitter handle into the elgg site (via a profile_manager field). i could add that as a feature.

or the more complete solution would be to fully integrate sharing into the elgg notifications system. i didn't do that simply due to it not being a high priority feature (and you are the 1st to ask for it). it can be done though, yes.

I was curious about the second part. Fully integrated into elgg using elggs notification system. That i think would be neat. Shows the users that their items are being shared and growing organically

that could be done. however, to be truly accurate - i think the code would need to track every click of the sharing buttons via jquery / ajax and then monitor the stats uniquely from the target network - to see if the share count has increased or not (since the sharing buttons can be clicked and then the process can be cancelled - so monitoring on the elgg side only is not enough).
this is not such a great solution - though it may work with enough tweaking.

Would it be possible to get social icons like these? http://us.wow.com/ ?

i recently changed the code to allow a choice of having the text for the icons inside the buttons or to have no text.

beyond that, you can use whatever button images you prefer - since each button has a unique css class and you can replace the images/style for each button via css in your theme.

i was going to upload a new version here soon, though i was waiting to get more info about facebook, since fb has been using incorrect image thumbnails for some items and i don't know why yet.. the other sites are fine, as far as i know.

Thank you for this great plugin! I have a little problem with sharing single tidypics images that are within an album, which is set to public. It is said that I am not allowed to share it...

@Hanzolo - ura welcome! which version of tidypics are you using? i haven't tested this plugin with the latest beta version and some relevant parts may have changed.

Yep, that is just the version I am using: 1.8.1beta12

ah, well beta13 is the latest version.

i am using beta12 here and the sharing is fine for me.
the only check in the code which would result in the message appearing in the sidebar, saying that you cannot share the entity unless it is set to public, is indeed a check to make sure that the entity is set to public.

are you sure that the privacy level is set to public for both the image and the album?

Hm, I wonder where I can set the privacy level for a single image... the album, ist set to public

oh ok, great point.. i missed that the more recent versions of tidypics don't allow the individual images to be set to an access level - so i need to change this plugin to look at the album, not the image.
i will do that and release an update asap.

Looks like the version of iionly does not allow to set the privacy for single images. That might be the problem.

Thank you very much!