Meet the good Apple behind Fake Steve Jobs

The blogger known as Fake Steve Jobs continues to inhabit the Apple Inc. honcho’s mind online, but light shed on his true identity last week might rob the project of its heat.

Commenters at the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs predicted as much when they vented their anger at New York Times reporter Brad Stone for ruining the fun they’d had reading the phony musings of Apple’s CEO over the past year.

In a Web culture where revealing spoilers is tantamount to spitting in someone’s face, the fallout – which also hit the Times’ Bits technology blog – seemed inevitable. So did the Secret Diary of Brad Stone parody that soon popped up.

More surprising was how flat Fake Steve’s postrevelation entries read.

No matter how good they were (and the Microsoft razzing was entertaining), the posts lacked the magical context of having been written by a cipher.

Readers had speculated about the blogger’s identity for months. Was it an Apple insider, an irreverent executive from Redmond or a popular tech guru? Was it Jobs himself, letting down what was left of his hair while hiding in plain sight?

Well, no. As the blog’s thousands of fans now know, it’s penned by Daniel Lyons, a Forbes senior editor on the East Coast who has never covered Apple.

It’s hard to suspend disbelief now that we know the man behind the tagline “Dude, I invented the friggin iPhone. Have you heard of it?” also wrote a 2005 “Attack of the blogs” piece for Forbes sporting this subhead: “Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.”

Aside from inviting charges of hypocrisy from critics such as Anil Dash of blog provider Six Apart, the unmasking of Fake Steve could come back to bite Lyons as a journalist.

It might not be much fun for him to report on the recording industry, for instance, after his hot-headed alter ego dismissed the “criminals in the music business” as “sons of whores.”

On the other hand, Lyons has sustained a lively persona that’s set to star in a novel this fall. As long as readers lap up lampoons of the rich and powerful, he should be fine.

“I would have preferred to remain anonymous forever,” Lyons said last week via e-mail, although his employers “seem to be psyched” about Fake Steve. (Forbes now sponsors the blog.)

He also dismissed the hypocrisy rap. “Anil is a good guy,” Lyons said. “I was never as ‘anti blog’ as he and others seem to think. But I’ve definitely been captivated by blogging.”

Will being unmasked suck the fun out of ranting as Fake Steve Jobs? “Not sure yet,” Lyons admitted. “It’s just been weird to see this take off and spread so wildly on its own. I started it as a lark, jotting down little jokes for a few friends to read.”

It’s blossomed into a phenomenon that so far has seeded blogs by Fake Rupert Murdoch of News Corp., Fake Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and his compatriot Fake Bill Gates – who has so much to say he’s got two sites.

“I promise they will NEVER find me!” Fake Steve Ballmer proclaimed last week. Either way, there’s plenty of room in the blogworld for more ersatz execs. No one seems to have launched a Fake Sumner Redstone site to chronicle the Viacom soap opera, for instance.

However, Lyons cautioned those who would follow in his mogul-aping footsteps, “You can’t do it unless you really admire the person you’re impersonating.”

That person won’t necessarily admire you back, though. After earlier admitting he’d read his fake counterpart, the real Steve Jobs told the Times he’s uninterested in Lyons’ novel.

Does Fake Steve Jobs cry real tears?