Most Tweets Pointless Babble: So What?

A whitepaper published by Pear Analytics (found via Mashable) says that 40.55% of all tweets are pointless babble. While that probably won’t get any raised eyebrows, it is worth to know how the good folks at PA got this conclusion:

So we took 2,000 tweets from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and captured tweets in half-hour increments. Then we categorized them into 6 buckets:

News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.

Get the whole thing from the PA blog post.

So 40.55% of the tweets are pointless babble. That will throw kindling on the Twitter is just nonsense fires out there for sure. Now with numbers!

So what?

Look at blogs, they are a force to be reckoned with for sure. How much pointless babble will you find there?

In fact, look at old media as a whole, do an analysis of a newspaper, or a tabloid, of whatever, and the content within. How many procent will be pointless babble?

I’ll tell you, it would depend on where you were looking.

There’s probably less pointless babble in the New York Times, than in The Sun. The same applies to Twitter, and to blogs. It depends on who you’re listening to.

Again, for the haters out there: it depends on who you’re listening to.

No need to say it a third time I suppose? After all, if you can build your Twitter bashing on a random study from public tweets without any real categorization, then you could move on and strike off the internet as well. Listening to the public timeline is like searching the web without Google removing all the rubbish.

So yeah. There’s pointless babble on Twitter. So what?