Childish is almost insulting to children. They're still insisting that twitter somehow deprived them of a business. Oh and that bit.ly's offer of actual cash is a 'publicity stunt'.
I don't see how that's a publicity stunt. It's an offer that seems to take into account "We want out of this business, we're losing money, and we don't think this is at all monetizable". If I straight-up say "I'm desperate and need cash and think this is a piece of junk, and it's costing me money just to hold onto it", then I can expect low-ball offers.
Economically speaking, if it's a choice between shutting down and being bought out, anything more than a dollar is a good deal. Yeah, it's a dick move and it's taking advantage of someone, but it's not a publicity stunt.
To understand the situation a bit better you should listen to this Podcast that covered the story behind it which is quite a bit different than what is being spun in TechCrunch.
How is it a publicity stunt, especially since bit.ly did not make this offer in public?
tr.im got into a business that they were unable to monetize, made a tremendous fuss about it. How exactly is this bit of shamelessness somebody else's publicity stunt?
In other words, they couldn't get the money they wanted, so they petulantly shut down the service. When they got push-back from doing that, they came up with this scheme.
If they actually can get this model up and running with everyone in the world being able to see their data, I'll be curious how that goes, especially as I'm not familiar with what sort of data they keep. Do they track the IPs of people who use tr.im links?
