Twitter tweets are 40% 'babble'

Carried out by US market research firm Pear Analytics, the study aimed to produce a snapshot of what people do with the service.

Almost as prevalent as the babble were "conversational" tweets that used it as a surrogate instant messaging system.

The study found that only 8.7% of messages could be said to have "value" as they passed along news of interest.

To get an idea of what Twitter was being used for, Pear Analytics dipped into the Tweet stream every 30 minutes between 11:00 and 17:00 on weekdays for a fortnight.

In total it grabbed 2,000 messages and then put each message it grabbed into one of six categories; news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and those with pass-along value.

(...) 40.5% could be classified as pointless babble, 37.5% as conversational and 8.7% as having pass-along value. Self promotion and spam stood at 5.85% and 3.75% respectively.