My guess is the majority of Calcanis’ readers will still find him credible, but the tech press might pause next time.

Yet, I’ll admit we didn’t really think it through and because of that there were quite a few folks who were upset and concerned about the situation and we both felt really bad once that sunk in.

I do want to make two things clear.

We didn’t intend to “purposely dupe” anyone. The intention was not to have people believing it was a real fight, it was more to lampoon and make light of some quick “copycat” finger-pointing that had been going on. I can see how that might have been assumed, but going in we honestly thought it was clear it was a joke.

As well, it was clarified almost immediately, like within hours, in the original posts as well as via IM to individuals and in comments on other blogs. There was no Twitter for real-time clarification, and we did the best we could. I know I personally didn’t really understand why people were upset at first, and did a fair amount of arguing about that, but we clarified that it was a joke right away.

Still, regardless of the fallout, it wasn’t a smart thing to do and all I can say in my defense is that I was really surprised at the reaction and had I known people would be genuinely upset I wouldn’t have been a part of it. Of course I didn’t want to upset anyone and, at the same time, the point of the whole thing was completely missed.

We are certainly guilty of not thinking it through and not considering the reactions of our readers, but implying that we intended to trick or upset people isn’t accurate.

Sometimes we can’t know the influence we’ll have or how people will react. We often tend to look at these things through our own lenses and group others according to that. I see something like this and think, “meh, wouldn’t bother me much.” But that’s me and when you’ve got an audience you need to think about how others might react. And trust me, ever since I’ve taken that into consideration with everything I write.

To me, that’s the key here. The people who were upset were upset because they felt their trust had been betrayed. That wasn’t the intention, but it doesn’t matter. Like you say, no one likes to be duped. If you think you’re even slightly misleading you might want to think twice.

In my opinion Jason made two big mistakes:

1) He mistook the nearly context-free Twitter for blogging. We’re meant to read it as a stream… it flows by during the time we’re reading it and even THEN we rarely see everything. Anyone following more than a couple dozen people is extremely unlikely to read everything tweeted by those they follow. And it’s ludicrously unlikely when the context here is “tech bloggers talking about iPad at that time”.

2) His defense, echoed by many others,is that only idiots (or drunk-on-koolaid types, etc.) would have been duped, so– if your “mistake” was only a mistake to STUPID people, it doesn’t actually count as a mistake, right?

Anyone who lists, say, three of the more outrageous tweets Jason made as evidence for the stupidity of readers is, frankly, displaying a lack of understanding of Twitter, and viewing it through a naive/newbie “it’s like a blog, except with smaller posts” lens.

I actually thought his tweets were fascinating and I was enjoying it as a puzzle/mystery to figure out if he was telling the truth, and wondering when or if you’d finally see the thing that was CLEARLY too outrageous. And had it been a blog or even series of blog posts, I think far more people would have enjoyed it as well.

But to craft a joke — via Twitter — that depended ENTIRELY on readers seeing ALL of his tweets in order to “get” the joke, –I believe he is normally much smarter than that. He just made a mistake and now wants to blame the readers who seem to “get” the nature of Twitter far more than Jason does.

“There is no way it could be designed for $499 in a 1.5 pound package!!!”

The problem with that is the price of $499, nor the weight of 1.5 lbs, had been announced at the time of the tweets.

Just sayin…

That all said, the hype about the ? iPad was generated by the same people that bought this shit as reality. Apple never released information and people just went crazy. As a realist and cynic, I expected something less than desirable (iPod HiFI?) and was rewarded with something pretty slick.

I friend of mine I follow fell for the prank which I started reading. After tweet 2 I knew it was a fake, it also confirmed why I stopped following JC. Let’s all stop talking about him now…

By the way, he must have called in his troups in this comments thread… damn..