RIP, Fake Steve Jobs.
He really was the Job's bollocks when it came to wringing the tech egos of Silicon Valley, but canny New York Times reporter Brad Stone did some digging and then compared his writing to that of Forbes' tech editor Daniel Lyons. Lo, the faker was revealed.
To be fair, Lyons has already 'fessed up to his Forbes colleagues because he felt bad, he said, that so many of them were trying to work out FSJ's identity. His editor Richard Karlgaard even offered an iPod to whoever could do the unmasking, but I guess once half the Forbes staff knew it was only a matter of time before it leaked out.
If you haven't discovered the delights of FSJ before - and you have the stomach for tech industry nano-humour - do come in. The water's lovely.
Illustration one: Friday's post about the much-blogged photo of an iPhone demo kiosk running Windows in an AT&T store: "So who got fired? I'm sure you want to know. Well, it was a guy named Pete Dorn, who works in our supply chain organization at Apple. No, he didn't have anything to do with the Apple stores. But somebody had to be fired. We pulled his name from a hat."
Two: Squirrel Boy, aka Google chief executive Eric Schmidt says Jobs is wrong about web TV: "So Eric calls me up all pissed off and tells me I'm suffering from a massive case of recto-cranial inversion on this Internet content thing. He says he's the king of the internet and that I'm a dope for calling all these new internet-only shows "the Special Olympics version of real TV." ... Eric also says I'm a chump and a whore for trying to play nice with the Hollywood guys instead of doing battle with them the way Google is doing... Well, I don't know. I must admit, I'm so busy up in the JobsPod trying to design beautiful devices that restore a sense of childlike wonder to people's lives that I don't have time to keep up with all these internet TV shows."
Three: On a pic of Lindsay (cough) Lohan with an iPhone: "Lindsay Lohan is flashing something shiny and slippery again only this time it's a friggin iPhone. Trust me, heads are rolling in the Apple retail division today. We spent huge amounts of time on this. We had a weight limit, an age limit, and a list of famous people who were not allowed to have one... Harvey Weinstein, Michael Eisner, Yoko Ono, Britney Spears, K-Fed - absolutely not, for fuck's sake. This is a classy device meant for discerning and intelligent people who know enough to demand the best... It undermines our entire image. Look at those shorts, for God's sake."
Oh dear. I'm talking about him as if he's dropped off a bridge or something, when in actual fact he's just moving to Forbes.com. But will the allure be quite to compelling now that we know who he is? I don't think so. The mystery was half the fun. Bad, bad Brad.
FSJ asks if anyone can thinking of cool ways to use the name "Brad Stone" as a verb, meaning to party poop, or unmask at the expense of other people's fun. FSJ's blog post was labelled "filthy hacks" and "media whores".
So who do we turn to now?
TechCrunch, paidContent, Engadget and Giga Om are all well enough, but painfully short on salacious (dare we say fictional) gossip.
ValleyWag sticks a toe in gossip, but the other foot is firmly planted in news.
Perez, Holy Moly and Popbitch can all titillate, but tickle quite a different part.
Sigh. Who will be the next Fake Steve Jobs?
