He is an investor of Seesmic. He is also the founder of TC.
He used TC to promote Seesmic. Seesmic founder made some predictions which didn't come true (like millions of other people who makes predictions that doesn't come true).
A rational, reasonable, sane investor would chalk it out as an investment not working out the way they hoped for. But MA has to single him out, of all the people who were wrong, in public and ridicule him.
After this and crunchpad incident, why would any reasonable person would want to do business with this unstable individual? You have to be extremely desperate or stupid to do business with him.
IMO YMMV.
ps. You can chalk out my reaction towards him as not pandering to TC and everything Arrington like most of HN.
I'm not a big fan of Loic but I agree with you here, Arrington is being a jerk on that one.
I've never got what the business model of twitter clients was (except the paid ones on the appstore, although even those must not be doing that much) and Arrington was pretty stupid to invest in one, now he must be pissed at himself and decided to take it all on Loic.
On TechCrunch, he plays the role of journalist and I think he did the right thing by pointing out that some developers are in denial.
As a writer for TechCrunch, unless Arrington promised "favorable" treatment to Seesmic, I see absolutely nothing wrong in him criticizing Seesmic based on publicly available information.
If Seesmic didn't want to be criticized on TC, they should have made that a pre-condition for funding (and I'm sure Arrington wouldn't have contributed to funding the company)
Just so we are clear, Arrington is not a journalist. He has a (popular) tech blog where he writes half-baked, regurgitated & over-simplified news, ethically questionable and often factually incorrect blog posts.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/10/developers-in-denial-the-se...
Seriously. Is this normal for investors to be a major dick like Arrington?
"Oh you made a prediction and it was wrong. IN YOUR FACE! haha!"
What the hell?