A funny thing happened on Twitter yesterday. A Tweeter calling himself Adam Curry was outed as a fake. In a stirring confession the fake Curry posted the following:
"Confession time: I am the FAKE Adam Curry! I just emailed the real Adam Curry to see if he would like to take over and start TWITTERING!"
A general silence swept over the Twitter world for 10 minutes, and then the responses came in:
@davewiner I think everyone should take a picture of themselves next to their computer with their twitter account
Hey everyone... don't unfollow me... the REAL adam is coming soon!
OK...the REAL Adam Curry is about to take over... signing off.... and now, I present... the REAL Adam Curry!
And then supposedly the real Podfather Adam Curry takes over and leaves the following posts:
I see that Dave Winer got duped by this, so to him I say: Big Pink is where we got no service. Now he knows it's really me.
OK, thank you Bobo for building an audience of twitters for me, but found your methodology a bit disturbing.
Too funny for words. First of all, the fake Adam Curry managed to build a huge audience of followers for his fake "shameless plugs" for podcasts. And for the most part no one was the wiser. Then a fit of conscience sets in and the faker confesses and begs the real Adam Curry to step up, which supposedly happened, although Curry doesn't mention any of this on his blog. My guess is that Curry, who's visiting San Francisco this week, was approached by someone who congratulated him for Twittering and he looked at them like they were from Planet X. And that's when all this started to unravel for "Bobo" or whomever was playing Curry.
Even today who knows if Adam Curry is actually Twittering or if it's still the fake Curry asking folks to "spliff" him. The real Curry indicated on a Daily Source Code episode that he thought Twitter was an American fad and that the United States had just caught up to Europe and the SMS craze. Essentially, he dismissed Twittering as a waste of time. The fake Curry seemed to love Twitter, was a tweeting fool and looked rather cool in that 80's-era euro-jumpsuit-thingy.
I'm not sure it matters at this point who's real and who's fake. However, I doubt if anyone's planning to take any Adam Curry tweets to heart from now on. Transparency is a good thing and honesty still matters. One last tweet found this afternoon:
@adamcurry:ur phake