When reader Liam Dennis updated his Twitter for iPhone app yesterday, it told him that Steve Jobs had registered a Twitter account. He explains:
“It scanned my address book for users I wasn’t following. It only found one. A twitter account linked to [email protected], a contact I had made to send the occasional email to him as we all do.
The [email protected] email address is known, of course, as Steve Jobs’ email address at Apple — the one he uses for his famous one-word responses to customers’ queries.
So has Jobs finally registered a Twitter account?
Here’s the deal: Anyone can create a username AND tweet without confirming the email address. The email needs to be confirmed to unlock advanced features, but it’s not necessary to use the web interface.
In fact, most combinations of “Steve Jobs,” “S Jobs” and “S Jobs Apple” are already taken. We even registered Steven_P_Jobs to test it out.
There’s been a bit of activity with fake Steve Jobs accounts on Twitter recently. On Wednesday, Twitter suspended the popular @ceostevejobs parody account for a few hours before reinstating it. And then it suspended it again. It’s been reestablished as @falsestevejobs.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
10 responses to “Has Steve Jobs Finally Registered A Twitter Account?”
being head of the cult he has nothing to fear from his followers.
I would doubt Mr Jobs would ever bother with something like Twitter. I would imagine he would see it as an unnecessary trivial distraction.
He doesn’t have time to be tweeting.
why would he bother with twitter when most of his emails are less than 140 characters anyway?
Why would Jobs bother answering emails.
the fact that this account hasn’t started posting weird messages out of character for the generally quiet Steve, makes me wonder if in fact it is real.