Twitter: Four per cent 'news', 40 per cent 'pointless babble'

Just over 40 per cent of posts on Twitter - or tweets - can be classified as "pointless babble", according to a new study from Pear Analytics. Coming in second was "conversational", which the company says makes up 37.55 of all tweets.

Pear Analytics published its investigation, which was conducted through a series of random samplings from the Twitter public timeline, into the different species of tweets last week. That means that only public tweets were indexed; the numbers could be different if friends-only accounts were taken into consideration as well.

Despite some Twitter critics' insistence that the microblogging service is loaded with self-promoters, Pear Analytics only classified 5.85 per cent of tweets as "self promotion".

The other categories were "news" (3.6 per cent), "spam" (also lower than some might expect, at 3.75 per cent), and "pass-along value" (8.7 per cent).

The report read: "We thought the news category would have more weight than dead last, since this seems to be contrary to Twitter's new position of being the new source of news and events."

That might be a bit of a buzzkill for Twitter's team, which is pretty vocal about wanting the service to be a ubiquitous communication standard. Regardless, the news about the relatively low levels of spam is interesting - for some perspective, about 90 per cent of email is spam.

Original article: Study: Twitter is 40 percent 'pointless babble' from CNET News.com