Form letter template for acquired startups

gistfile1.txt

Dear soon-to-be-former user,

We've got some fantastic news!  Well, it's great news for us anyway.  You, on 
the other hand, are fucked.

We've just been acquired by:

[ ] Facebook
[ ] Google
[ ] Twitter
[ ] Other: _________________

As you are aware, we've always provided a free service, and have never even 
tried offering a for-pay option.  This means we've never had any income and 
have been operating at a loss for our entire existence.  Since any schoolchild 
can see this is unsustainable, it should have been more-or-less obvious to you 
from the get-go that we were either going to crap up the site with ads at a 
few cents per-click, or that we've always intended to be an acquisition target.
You can do the math on that one.

Your personal data which, until just now, was critical to our core business 
will be deleted:

[ ] Immediately
[ ] Within a week
[ ] Within 30 days

We are excited to continue our core mission of connecting people with 
solutions at our new home.  Please realize that this is so vague a statement 
as to be completely meaningless.  But we just made so much money that at the 
moment we genuinely believe this horseshit.  In reality, you will never hear 
about us or anything we create ever again.  We are probably going to end up, 
like, implementing a new scrollbar for Google Reader or something.

Thanks so much for making our business so valuable and enticing to a much 
larger company with more money than sense.

Now grab your data while you still can and get out of here,

Shiny happy Shit.ly management ninjas
Connecting people with solutions
"Shit.ly loves you!"

@delomos

composted: http://cloud.jtmkrueger.com/2s3q3z433a14180V1t23

composed: http://cloud.jtmkrueger.com/0T1I0n2f2I1L2x1Z1f2P

Hopefully these images will help.

@jtmkrueger I wish I had a clue >.<

@jtmkrueger

"Composted"? No, I didn't mean that, but I lol'd when I read it. ("That's how we do things... at shit.ly!")
Nice images too. I was expecting something more graphic and gross, actually. I probably shouldn't say that.

Or, you could pull an Imeem when they were acquired by Playlist.com, and then MySpace...Just redirect imeem.com to myspace.com and put a tiny pop-up in the right hand corner that says "Imeem is now MySpace! We hope you're excited as we are! Just use your regular Imeem login and you're good-to-go! As a side note- we've been experiencing difficulties migrating the playlists you spent hours creating..um, stay tuned!" > lost all my playlists <

So true.

My only beef with this is that as people we all want to forward ourselves. Why us that wrong? AND if people didn't expect things for free and would come off their cheap asses to pay a dollar for something I dedicated my life to building maybe I'd feel differently.

A friend once complained that all he got was a t-shirt for his donation. He forgot that the app he was dinating to took hundreds if hours to build. Who is subsidizing who here? Honestly.

I wonder if Sparrow considered using this?