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Founders tend to have insider info on when a company is headed for death. Side projects are essentially an internal acknowledgement of that, but the "official" death of the company or the publicizing of the side project only takes place once the project has gained enough momentum that they know it's worth pursuing full-time. Mattermark/Refer.ly is a perfect example of that.

Actually, we announced the Referly shut down in March 2013 (1) and played with several ideas after that. Based on our most popular content, we thought we would be a tech blog for about 4 weeks... code named "Cursive".

The first commit for Mattermark was made Apr 22, 2013 and we didn't buy the domain for more than a month after that.

(1) http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/03/zombie-startups/

That's gotta make your "founding" customers happy.

Indeed. I wish they'd tell us what that new venture is so we can know to avoid it as well. Some of these announcements read like parodies ("incredible journey", yada yada)

Here's a collection of them: http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/