By Malcolm Owen | 3 Comments
Posted: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 12:13 am

From the department of news-gathering labelled only as “Did this really need to be researched?” comes: Twitter is used for pointlessness…

Yes, someone with way too much time on their hands (Pear Analytics) has found out that out of a random sample of 2000 Tweets, that 40% of them are classifiable as “Pointless Babble”. The rest consists of conversation, spam and self promotion.

Although I would generally say the findings are probably accurate, I do feel that the 2000 sample Tweets checked are simply too few to confirm the findings. 2000 might be a lot, but there are many times more tweets sent on a daily basis, dwarfing the sample. Add in the fact that it’s only the public timeline tweets (ignoring private ones) captured every 30 minutes over a 2 week period, and it becomes really quite meagre. I would have thought that 20,000 or 100,000 Tweets would be a fairly decent amount to check from, but 2000? Seriously?

Pear Analytics have said that they aim to be doing this regularly. I hope next time they monitor more tweets, say, like ours?

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