I’ve added support for this to Jtwitter, the Java library for Twitter which I maintain.

One is that your if and else (on the $count==0) have the same code in them.

Second is that this line of code is wrong:

<?php $count = get_tweet_count(the_permalink()); ?>

The the_permalink() function echo’s the permalink to the output. It does not return it as a string to be passed to another function. Change that line to this:

<?php $count = get_tweet_count(get_permalink()); ?>

This is the code I have for my WordPress loop and function:

LOOP

<!-- TWEET BUTTON - HIDE COUNT IF THE COUNT IS 0 --<
<?php $count = get_tweet_count(the_permalink()); ?>
<?php if ($count == 0){ ?>
	<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; type="text/javascript"></script>
	<a href="http://twitter.com/share&quot; class="twitter-share-button"
	  data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"
	  data-via="TITLE"
	  data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>"
	  data-related=""
	  data-count="horizontal">Tweet</a>							
<?php } else { ?>
	<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js&quot; type="text/javascript"></script>
	<a href="http://twitter.com/share&quot; class="twitter-share-button"
	  data-url="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"
	  data-via="TITLE"
	  data-text="<?php the_title(); ?>"
	  data-related=""
	  data-count="horizontal">Tweet</a>							
<?php } ?>

FUNCTION

function get_tweet_count($url) {
	$count = 0;
	$data = wp_remote_get('ht'.'tp://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url='.urlencode($url) );
	if (!is_wp_error($data)) {
		$resp = json_decode($data['body'],true);
		if ($resp['count']) $count = $resp['count'];
	}
	return $count;
}
?>

It always returns 0. Am I missing something?

Can you help?