Twitter is pointless babble

A story that no doubt raised a wry smile from the luddites this week was Pear Analytics’ study of 2,000 tweets which announced that 40% of Tweets are meaningless. 

Personally, I’m not a big fan of Twitter , I don’t find that it meets my own needs as a tool for communication, but I have no doubt that there is a massive value in realtime broadcast IM (which is essentially what Twitter is). In the dark halls of the Mobile Network Operators, someone will be working on a walled version.

For many hundreds of thousands of people, Twitter is an excellent means of staying bang up-to-date with, well, whatever they find important.  Pear’s study found almost 9% of Tweets to have ‘pass-along’ value and nearly 40% to be conversational – sounds like a mirror image of most people’s personal email accounts (without the spam).

A friend of mine who is an avid Twitterer described the service as: ‘the perfect medium for complaining’ as his negative Tweets gather many like-minded responses whilst his positive comments are met with yawning silence. Just seen a bad movie? Everyone wants to chip in with their opinion; just finished a fantastic book? Nada.

Perhaps an in-depth psychological study of Twitter users is called for?