If i said “I will give you $10″, and not give you anything for 1 year, if you remembered me telling you I was going to give you $10 and didn’t, you would think me a liar… When in all actuality, i may have intended to give you the $ on the 3rd Wednesday of 2055.

This sort of vague inference is used mostly by politicians, and other such ” shady ” people as a backdoor escape from their actions.

The truth of the matter is that their intentions, and methods are quite clear. By intentionally leaving out information or obscuring the tactics with well crafted wording.

You also say ” If it says “early upgrade”, it implies the upgrade is not forced. Furthermore, it also implies there will be a later upgrade that does not require tweeting.”

This is nothing but an assumption. If it says ” early upgrade” then that’s all it means, that the upgrade is early. Where you get it means it’s not forced, or that the details of the ” later ” upgrade will not require a tweet is beyond me.

The fact remains the same, all over the internet these so called ” respectable ” sites use tactics that in real world would be considered theft, plagiarism, or fraud. By intentionally using code to encapsulate another person’s website within a frame / iframe or include on their site, they are effectively stealing the bandwidth from the origin’s site, not to mention using their site to intentionally promote themselves off of a well known brand. By hiding behind an act as a suplimentary service for the originating site they feel it is perfectly fine to lie, cheat, steal, and fraudulently pass themselves off as a legitimate service.

The traditional, and correct way to build upon someone else’s brand is with written permission. An honorable solution for these so called ” services ” is to ask permission, or better yet, take a note from the facebook developers, and actually request an API so you may be able to implement your service from within, thereby being forced to abide by the site’s guidelines if any.

As it stands now, these shady people do what they want with their source, and piggyback off of another companies success without permission, or any sort of guidelines to maintain the security of said sites, or their users. The temptation under these circumstances are ripe for one of these shady people to start collecting and selling off any personal, or other gathered information about the users. Very slippery slope, and HAS happened before.

Ow.ly does not always return a 301 forward. In Firefox, it displays a toolbar which means it cannot do a 301 (The HTTP protocol doesn’t allow that!)

To see it in action, get the Live HTTP Headers Firefox addon, and watch the headers an ow.ly link returns. It’s HTTP 200, i.e. a successful serving of a page from the server.

a) If it says “early upgrade”, it implies the upgrade is not forced. Furthermore, it also implies there will be a later upgrade that does not require tweeting.

b) If I use an ow.ly link it’s because the content I’m sharing doesn’t have a Digg/Stumble/Reddit button, and therefore the source URL is useless. Why should I use a link that is not optimized for social bookmarking — even if it is source?

c) I use Twitter for my own purposes. If people like my content, they’ll click. If not, they won’t. Ow.ly has thus far given me more clicks on Twitter than bit.ly, Digg, or Tinyurl combined. Can’t argue with success.

d) Telling other people how to use Twitter is lame. If you don’t like someone’s links, unfollow them. If you don’t like them personally, block them. Either way, there’s no RIGHT way to use Twitter.

Stay tuned…

For example, the contests where you have to tweet to enter are fine because they have clear cost & alternative (either you enter or you don’t). Hootsuite didn’t present it as an option.