Fake Steve Jobs, outed some time ago as Forbes’ Daniel Lyons, is retiring his satirical blog “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” thus ending one of the more enduring runs as pop Web iCon.
In a post titled “I’m sailing away,” Lyons says he’ll be launching a new site next week, perhaps reincarnating Fake Steve as Fake Somebody Else. His new form will be sitting at a desk at Newsweek.
Lyons doesn’t go into detail about the closure of the site, but if he is reinventing himself at Newsweek, the “A Forbes.com Site” at the top of the blog could be trouble for at least a couple of people.
Decline in traffic has been a problem, too. Surely the mystery of discovering who was playing Apple’s CEO online was part of the Fake Steve experience. Once discovered, it went from funny to just silly, a man, a journalist, playing dress-up. It’s okay. Sometimes alter egos work, sometimes they don’t. Ask Garth Brooks. At the end of the day, we still knew it was him.
Not for nothing, though. Lyons was sure to plug two versions of his new book, a best-of collection of posts from the blog—the second version, unabridged by request, and matching Lyons’ personal copy. In true blogger-form, Lyons created it and is selling it through Webby-award winning online publisher Blurb.
It’s good timing to get out of the Fake Steve Jobs bids. Twitter managed to stay up all day through the incessant “I’m in line for the new iPhone” tweets—some reporting up to six hour waits—which were replaced with “My new iPhone is a brick” ones. Seems AT&T’s servers weren’t exactly prepared for the demand. As iPhone 3G purchasers and iPhone 1.0 upgraders powered iTunes all at once—really? You couldn’t wait until after lunch, until you got home, next week?—the AT&T sky really began to fall.
If I’m ever in line that long, there better be a buffet or a roller coaster at the end—one that lasts the rest of the day.
