Damn you iPhone.
Damn you Tweetie2.
Damn you SimplyTweet.
And most of all, DAMN YOU TWITTER.

…ok fine. So my Twitter addiction is not because of the above, but hey, I need something to blame, and I am sticking to the above as excuses.

When I first started Twitter, I had close to zero friends and didn’t really…well…get it. And by “getting it”, I mean Twitter. Most of the interesting people only interacted with each other and completely ignored me.

What. The. F**K.

It was sucky to be disregarded and I felt really lame…well…more like I was talking to a wall. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. *crickets*…ok, so I’d say more interesting things than HI or @Oprah I JUST ATE A GRILLED CHEESE FOR LUNCH TALK TO ME. But I digress. Where was I? Oh, ya. Twitter addiction.

So fast forward a year or so when I finally attended a blog conference. Oh man, that changed my entire Twitter experience. I finally met almost everyone I interacted with online for over a year in *gasp* PERSON. Through my existing friends, I met a ton of new and interesting people and now my Twitter stream is out of control FUN.

Combine the connections with the convenience of Twitter on the go and BAM. My average of 3 Tweets a day escalated to approximately 30-50 Tweets a flippin’ day…Holy smokes, still looking at the stats on followcost.com and mortified. I am one chatty mother f**ker — why are ya’ll still following me? Wow.

Tweetie2 and its amazingness encouraged my addiction; I mean how can you NOT love the pull down to refresh feature? SimplyTweets’ push notifications alert me to new @replies and Twitter’s web UI keeps improving with new features and functions. I also have 10 Twitter apps aside from Tweetie2 and SimplyTweets.

Um, wow.

Add everything together and now, I am:

1. responding to all and any who talk to me on Twitter …within a minute.
2. introduced to at least one person a day, so my Twitterverse keeps expanding.
3. my face is ALWAYS in my phone – walking, waiting, at a restaurant, bar, anywhere and everywhere. I don’t even turn it off for dates.

My dependence on Twitter is so bad, I exceed Twitter’s third party app 100 API call hourly limit…every EFin hour. My phone constantly runs out of batteries in less than four hours. I even walk around with a frickin’ wall plug and shamelessly ask establishments if I can recharge my phone. Using their electricity.

Uhhh double wow. I have a life, I really do. I…swear?

SIGH. Fine, I have a problem and when I write out details of my Twidiction (Twitter+addiction) it is definitely unhealthy, socially inept, and rude, since I cannot seem to tear myself away, even when I step outside. Damn you, Twitter, for being so interesting.

Well, I need to do something about this problem. So starting from today, I am challenging myself to limiting my Tweets to 10 a day (at the most).

But more importantly, my friend Shannon is correct when she says: “Tweets are like farts in the wind.”  As in, Tweets come, go, then disappear into thin air. There’s no way to archive (except favoriting which is a huge clustermess, but that’s a separate entry). Why even bother with the frustration? I have a blog as well as various places to flap my piehole, so why not utilize them?

Let’s see how long this will last.

Are you addicted to Twitter? If so, when did you realize your addiction, and are you planning to do something about it? Share your story and if you wish, we will support each other wean off our addiction!

Jenn Fowler pointed me to a piece on Social Media Ethics for Journalists by Gina Chen which starts out with a statement from Online Journalism Review:

“Journalistic ethics are pretty much the same online as in print or broadcast: Don’t plagiarize; tell readers how you got your information; don’t accept gifts or money for coverage; tell the truth; be honest.”

Well, if everyone operated under those codes, ethics in the digital medium wouldn’t be an issue. While the experts and leaders in the community are figuring out a standard, normal people like you and me who participate in daily social media activities must ask and answer certain questions to ourselves.

1. Do I trust who is sharing the information?
2. What makes me want to reshare?
3. When should I check my sources?
4. Where do I share this informtion?
5. Why do I share this information?

Why should this even matter to me?

Think about it… how often do you ReTweet and share articles you come across on Twitter and or Facebook? I don’t know about you, but I see RTs all the time and my Facebook is inundated by shares. How many people do your shares reach?

Last year, I said data is democratizing…and it is. More so than ever. News sources are becoming more and more digitized. Information is so simple to publish, and data spreads like wildfire. Journalists from your favorite bloggers to trusted major publications race against each other to break exclusive stories and scramble daily to appear on leader boards of headline aggregating sites. When speed is required, there will be mistakes — we are all human, even journalists.

As much as I want to trust the sources I once did, those days are long gone. Past achievements of journalists should be respected, but their credential(s) and / or pedigree(s) must not equate to automatic credibility.

Which leaves decisions up to us.

Us meaning you, me, everyone who participates in content sharing communities such as Facebook, Twitter, et al., to think before drawing conclusions or re-sharing the “hot topic”. After all, it is up to us, the readers, who reshare or RT that can make or break stories.

So my question is: What is your credibility criteria? How do you determine which sites or Twitter accounts do you follow? Trust the most?

*portions of piece taken from my original post here — just thought I’d bring it up again because I feel like I’ve been preaching about this forever.

Don’t know about you, but the iPhone app store is about 80% useless redundant. There are so many frickin’ apps, I don’t know what’s good, what’s bad, which apps have push notifications that actually…well…work…?

However (!!!!)

I may have found the triad of apps with push notifications. Since I’m feeling generous today, I will share with y’all.

1. For the email junkies: PushGmail
Now before you barrage the “TELL ME SOMETHING I DON’T KNOW“s; wait. And read. For people who have:

• multiple Gmail accounts
• one Exchange email already set-up on phone

PushGmail is the perfect solution. Still don’t follow? Ok, so I have my work Exchange email set-up, but I also Gmail all day errrrday. With PushGmail, my work emails get pushed onto my phone, and now my Gmail gets pushed too -read: best of both worlds. Have my cake and eat it too. I love this app more than fat kid love cake. At any which way, PushGmail RULES and is only 99cents. WELL worth the dollar (and some change)

2. For the sports addicts: Sportacular
In complete agreement with Kevin (jkontherun) who said: “Sports junkies that have an iPhone or iPod Touch owe it to themselves to take a look at Sportacular.” Holy smokes, this app is amazing. Scores are pushed (multi level settings, create alerts for only games and or teams you keep with) and it’s not just scores. Articles, breaking news, standings, etc., are available too but the best part? It’s free. Free. Screw ESPN. Sportacular is notch.

3. For the breaking news types: Twitter

Ok fine. So this one isn’t an app. But I’ve tried the AP and CNN apps but frankly, for instant breaking news, Twitter’s mobile alerting beats all. First, enable mobile alerts from Twitter to phone. Find your favorite news source and click the lil cell phone logo right by the “Follow” button and breaking news will be texted to you.  Like this (points below)

So these are my three must have apps for push – what’re yours?