I have always struggled with getting all the various share buttons from Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, etc to align correctly and to not look like a tacky explosion of buttons. Seeing a number of sites rolling their own share buttons with counts, for example The Next Web I decided to look into the various APIs on how to simply return the share count.

http://cdn.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://stylehatch.co

Returns: {"count":528,"url":"http://stylehatch.co/"}

http://graph.facebook.com/?id=http://stylehatch.co

Returns: { "id": "http://stylehatch.co", "shares": 61 }

http://www.linkedin.com/countserv/count/share?url=http://stylehatch.co&format=json

Returns: {"count":17,"fCnt":"17","fCntPlusOne":"18","url":"http:\/\/stylehatch.co"}