What happens when you post a link on Twitter?

When a link is put into a Twitter posting, the link gets crawled very quickly by the following agents: @hourlypress Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; abby/1.0; +http://www.ellerdale.com/crawler.html) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Windows NT 5.0) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 TweetmemeBot Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Feedtrace-bot/0.2; bot@feedtrace.com) Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; mxbot/1.0; +http://www.chainn.com/mxbot.html) User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 [...]