Twitter, a service which lets users post brief, 140-character messages for friends and perfect strangers alike, has already evolved its own telegraphic grammar of @ signs ("tweets," or messages, directed "at" a specific user, yet posted publicly) and # signs (denoting a topic for the message). Add to that services like TinyURL and Bit.ly which condense Web addresses into short, unreadable masses of characters. It's also spawned a cottage industry of applications which people use to post messages, with oddball names like Twhirl and TweetDeck and Ping.fm. The result are messages like these:

It's the very definition of too insidery. How are tech newcomers supposed to decode all these inscrutable traditions.

So when a tipster asked me if Kawasaki's Twitter account had been hacked, after it started displaying some incomprehensible messages about fried chicken, I stared at it for a while. Eventually I gave up and just called Kawasaki to ask.

Yes, he told me, when I reached him at an airport, his account had been hacked, but it was probably his fault. "I was using a new service called Adjix, and I did something too fast," he told me. "I can't explain it." Sort of like Twitter.

Kawasaki then suggested I speculate that he faked the hacking to get more attention. He added that he loved the hacker's tweets about fried chicken, and would gladly add it as a topic to his website Alltop.com. See? Everything on Twitter ends up being about self-promotion.

Update: Adjix president Joe Moreno, in an email, said that Kawasaki mistakenly broadcast his login credentials over the service, allowing a hacker to take control of his account.

Kawasaki's hacked Twitter page:

So what is Guy's new book about? To be honest, I have no idea. I didn't read it. I didn't even pretend to read it. Guy is craven enough that he doesn't really care whether I read his book or not. As he put it to me, all he wants is a famous name to put on the cover, and pretty much everyone turned him down and so he had to resort to calling me, and so, fine.

So this is it — my official endorsement. Reality Check is by far the best book ever written about the Valley. It's an important and necessary work, one that should be required reading in every business school in the country. I wish this book had been around when I was starting Apple in my garage back in 1976.

There's a really super-important lesson, yet one that so many people overlook, especially here in the Valley. Anyway, if these incredibly super-obvious things aren't already super-obvious to you, then you probably need to read a book like this and have someone like Guy Kawasaki teach you how to start a business in terms that a child could understand.

Namaste, poorly informed wannabe business people. I honor the place where your imbecilic gaze and my incredlibly wise words become one. Much love. Peace out.

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loïc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

(Photo from Michael Arrington)

A year ago, prolific advice-giver Guy Kawasaki bragged about Truemors, a "a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site" he built entirely on outsourced technology, including $4,500 of software development done in South Dakota. Today, all Truemors URLs redirect to the home page of NowPublic, a little-known citizen journalism site reported to have raised over $10 million. VentureBeat reports that Kawasaki has sold the site to NowPublic. He's almost certainly made a profit, but how much?

If Truemors had really built value, NowPublic would have left the site running. As is, it looks like Truemors' residual traffic is all they want. That's not a million-dollar deal. Kawasaki's real success is as a storyteller — in books, at conferences, and online. He's now got another story to tell. Mission accomplished.

(Photo via Threadless T-Shirts)

Fireworks, we thought, were inevitable when Lyons got on stage with Kawasaki, whom he's savaged on his blog. Turns out the worst thing Fake Steve said about Kawasaki was that he was a motorcycle designer, something Kawasaki found amusing. Our promised fireworks turned into kiddy-safe Independence Day sparklers.

Something to know about Dan Lyons: The man is as hilarious in person as in his best blog posts. He's quick, succinct, and dead-on with his observations. He is, as they say in Detroit, "wicked smaht." Also, he has a huge hard-on for Steve Jobs. Like, major mancrush. Lyons describes Jobs as a "son of Zeus born to a mere mortal" and other outrageous claims, which makes it seem like he's taking the piss out of Jobsian worshipers. Not true. Lyons really is an Apple fanboy who believes in the infallibility of His Steveness. Jobs is, to Lyons, "the most interesting person alive."

Which seems like the most boring thing he could say. But here's a secret for you: That awe is what makes the blog work. Lyons clearly venerates Jobs, without which his Fake Steve blog might come across as mean-spirited, not a satirical celebration.

One question kept coming up: How was Lyons treated by people who he slammed in the blog? He admitted to being worried about their reactions, but said that there have been few negative repercussions. He brought up Bike Helmet Girl, an early target for Fake Steve due to her appearance in a photo taken at a Yelp party last year. He initially ran the photo with a derisive caption. "Bikey" wrote in, a correspondence was born, and her character became a recurring figure in the blog. Lyons finally got a chance to meet her at a book signing last week, and spent a good minute in the Fake Steve character, dreamily recounting their meeting. (Lyons never revealed the lingering question about Bike Helmet Girl: Why was she wearing a bike helmet in the first place?)

I asked him about an article he wrote for Forbes, "Attack of the Blogs," a cover story which he railed against anonymous blogging as an abhorrent practice. Has being an anonymous blogger changed his mind about such practices? He admitted that he would like to "get a do-over" and rewrite the story. He likened his attack to writing a story focusing on spam as an example that all email was bad. "Tomorrow, Valleywag will call you a hypocrite," Kawasaki warned him.

Other Fake Steve revelations:

• Someone named "Katie Cotton" — the same name as the head of Apple PR — ordered a number of Fake Steve T-shirts from CafePress. (Brad Stone asked the real Cotton about the purchase. She declined to discuss any clothing purchases.)
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• The front row was filled with a line of Apple employees, one of whom brought an OS X programming book as light reading during downtime.
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• Kawasaki asked Lyons and Stone if they thought they would always be known as "Fake Steve" and "the guy who busted Fake Steve," much like Eddie Murphy will always be known as Donkey from Shrek. Lyons and Stone's reactions suggested they thought Kawasaki was nuts — and then started talking about how Donkey wasn't really representative of Eddie Murphy's career.
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• Brad Stone broke the news that Lyons was Fake Steve while Lyons was on his way to a Maine vacation with his wife, a vacation he had promised would be work- and blog-free. Stone's call to Lyons while he was en route changed all that. During their conversation, it was revealed that Lyons is the father of two-year-old twins. Stone and his wife are expecting twins soon. As their call was ending, Lyons promised Stone that he would buy two voodoo dolls of the twins and poke them at 2 a.m. random nights, to make up for Stone ruining Lyons's vacation.

• Tonight, in Mountain View, Forbes writer Dan Lyons meets with former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki for a Q&A session hosted by LinkedIn. Will there be mud wrestling? We can only hope. [Upcoming]
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• A panel on semantic search is taking place at Pillsbury Winthrop in Palo Alto. Former Powerset CEO Barney Pell is scheduled to speak. Take the chance to ask him about the rumored reasons he's no longer CEO of the hyped-up search engine. [VC Task Force]
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• Hey, it's election day! The only big contest around here is for Mayor of San Francisco, which is going to be Gavin Newsom again. (Since when does one elect a God-Mayor? - Ed.) Still, though, go out and vote. It's your civic duty!

• Got a to-do that's a must-do? Send it to calendar@valleywag.com. Check out more events on our Google Calendar: