According to a new report that studied 2,000 tweets over a period of two weeks, 40 per cent of Twitter updates are "pointless babble."
Twitter recently redesigned its homepage - shifting from "What are you doing now?" to "Share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world, indicating an attempt to become a real time news source.
Pear Analytics captured 200 English-language US tweets each half-hour from 11am - 5pm CST (6am -12pm GMT) daily.
It then categorized tweets into six different types: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversation, and pass-along value.
Mashable reports that the winner was "pointless babble" tweets - with 40.55 per cent fitting into the "I'm eating a sandwich now" category.
Conversational tweets came in a close second with 37.55 per cent. Pass-along value - retweets or RTs - were in third-place with only 8.7 per cent. Spam accounted for just 3.75 per cent of all tweets studied.
Other key results of the study included:
News tweets are heaviest at 2:00pm CST (9pm GMT) on TuesdaysPass-along value tweets are most frequently seen at 11:30am CST (7.30am GMT) on MondaysSpam tweets flow consistently all day, everydayConversational tweets are heaviest on TuesdaysPear will be conducting this same study every quarter to identify other trends in usage.
Read the full whitepaper here.
According to Quantcast.com these are Twitter's demographics as of June 2009:
Twitter reaches 27 million people per month in the US55 per cent are female43 per cent are between 18 and 3478 per cent Caucasian, but African American users are 35 per cent above InternetaverageAverage household income is between $30 and $60k1 per cent of the addicts contribute 35% of the visits72 per cent are passers by, while only 27 per cent are regular users
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