As a user, I find these sorts of attempts to control my experience for increased "engagement" incredibly obnoxious. At least the Ow.ly bar lets me easily turn it off permanently.

I can see myself using this! Nice job.

edit: Here is an example of my bar on the page shared above: http://bit.ly/TOlIDo

edit^2: Already shared with my friends that are big into social sharing. Again, nice work.

Happy to hear that! Thank you.

A demo would be nice, I'm not sure I understand the concept. Do I need to login with Facebook or Twitter to see how it works, or to get one of them (whatever they are)?

Yea, the front page definitely needs some work, you only need either Facebook or Twitter to get started, not both.

turns out I was misunderstanding, after logging in with Facebook I get the concept perfectly. Awesome idea, I think the frontpage is fine, I thought it was something a website owner added which confused me, my bad not yours!

Looks like Visibli (http://visibli.com), if you haven't seen it before.

First off, great idea and nice execution.

One small problem: When I share the bit.ly link (this one for instance: http://bit.ly/YCabMj) on FB it seems that the branded bar may be messing up the preview and causing it not to load.

Looking forward to seeing the progression of this idea.

Thanks for the feedback! I'm looking into it.

Great idea guys, and well executed.

I can totally see how this would increase the amount of followers you would get. Agreed with with @michaelhoffman though - it would be nice to have the option to permanently remove (there will always be those that hate seeing these things).

Hi Tom, Thanks! We will probably add such an option soon enough. btw, I'll contact you soon regarding Buffer integration :)

Probably minor to most visitors, but stuck out to me: The screenshot is being taken of a localhost instance. Easy fix.

EDIT: Also, BrianPetro's example broke heavily for me on Mobile Safari when zooming in.

So you load the webpage in an iFrame? Many websites wont let themselves be loaded into an iFrame to defend against clickjacking. For example you can't share youtube videos with this.

We check if a website allows embedding before creating the short link. In case embedding is forbidden we redirect to the web page itself, so we can still track analytics for that link (you'll also get a message about that in the dashboard).

nice job! I believe you have a "to do" list, but a mere 1 minute fix of changing the print-screen using your real URL would be nice :)

and ty for the inside history http://ozkatz.github.com/from-idea-to-mvp-to-1-on-hacker-new...

I misread the title, thought it said "A branded bear." That would have been more fun.

Definitely see the value in this. FYI small spelling mistake: virallity

pretty sure the correct spelling is virality.

Thanks! Good catch, fixing.

great execution. I wish there was a way to add more twiiter\fb profiles so I can share with personal or business profiles from the same account.