August 17, 2009 Study: 40 percent of Twitter is babblePosted: 09:21 AM ET
These findings may disturb some of you hard-core social networkers: A market research firm says 40 percent of tweets are "pointless babble." ![]() Pear Analytics analyzed random tweets over a two-week period and used that data to funnel the posts into six categories. More on the process:
"Conversational" tweets came in second place and made up nearly 38 percent of the posts analyzed. Researchers say they went into the project thinking that Twitter was mostly used for self-promotion. The firm concludes that, because of all of the babble, people who still want to use Twitter need some way to filter out irrelevant information. It seems like it's easier to me just to follow people who you trust and who you find interesting. More from the report:
Here's another report on the state of Twitter, visualized by Gizmodo. The blog has a nice chart of what Twitter would look like if there were only 100 Twitter users in the world (The blog got its data from an upcoming book, "Visualized, the Information Atlas," by David McCandless). Half are classified as "lazy," meaning they haven't posted in the last week. Only 5 percent of users have more than 100 followers, according to the analysis. What do you all think? Is Twitter overrun with babble? I've sensed a lot of why-is-CNN-so-obsessed-with-Twitter? heat in the comments lately, so I'd love to know what you all think about this! Posted by: John D. Sutter -- CNN.com writer/producer |
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