After a protracted back and forth over his fate, editor Mike Arrington is truly finished at TechCrunch, the influential website he started in 2005 and sold to AOL almost exactly one year ago. AOL says Arrington "decided to move on" to running his venture capital fund, relinquishing any role at TechCrunch or AOL.

Looks like we have some competition for tracking the media elite's bleat-replete tweets! Our competitive edge: We bring you the very worst of the Twitterati. Today's targets:

Twitter, the ideal medium for feigning emotion! Bonnie Fuller pretended to be shocked, Erick Schonfeld and Kara Swisher pretended to fight, and Sasha Frere-Jones pretended to function. Today's real fake tweets:

Time Warner's AOL and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington have been talking for the past two months, with AOL offering Arrington $20 million to $30 million to acquire tech's most dutiful clearinghouse for startup PR. Kara Swisher says that TechCrunch wants more than $30 million; we've heard he's looking for more like $100 million. Arrington has perpetually shopped his site around; all this deal talk reminds us how, just the other weekend, we overhead him wishing he could just sell out and move to Hawaii. Which makes for a nice pipe dream, but a weak negotiating position. Another reason to be skeptical: This is not Arrington's first flirtation with Time Warner.

"Joost's greatest asset right now is not it's peer-to-peer technology. It's the momentum its gained so far by being an early mover." — TechCrunch trophy hire Erick Schonfeld demonstrates the value of the old-media copy editors he left behind at Time Inc. [TechCrunch]

"Erick, where do you get these revelations from? IPO? Just because a still money losing pure content company gets a new CEO? Thanks for bringing this great analytical mind to bear on TechCrunch." A commenter to new TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld on his post about an IPO for political blog network Huffington Post. [TechCrunch]

TechCrunch and Business 2.0 never managed to merge, but editor Michael Arrington has snapped up former B2 editor-at-large Erick Schonfeld. (This explains why Schonfeld recently revived his dormant blog to cover the TechCrunch40 conference.) Opinionated, arrogant, and whip-smart, Schonfeld is the perfect match for Arrington. We're looking forward to the fireworks at TechCrunch edit meetings — to which Schonfeld will be dialing in remotely from Brooklyn. [Bits]