Shock! Horror! 40% of tweets on twitter are pointless babble!

Sigh. In the biggest Twitter story of the week, Pear Analytics research report concludes that 40% of tweets are - drum role - actually pointless babble. Outlets such as Computerworld, InformationWeek, Cnet and The Daily Telegraph have gleefully reported the twitter = babble story.

But, I fear they are missing the point. This study reflects analysis of 2,000 English tweets from the public timeline. This is akin to measuring a minute of radio commentary from 2,000 radio stations. Babble will feature highly, because there's a lot of babble out there.

Perhaps I'm unique in my Twitter usage, but I certainly don't spend time watching the public timeline for my news and information. Seems a rather inefficient way to use twitter if you ask me.

With tools such as TweetDeck allowing you to manage twitter searches via people, groups, or topic, there are rather easy ways to avoid the babble - and rather meaningless research reports!