Over at Pear Analytics, they’ve been analysing Twitter traffic to categorise exactly what it is people are tweeting about.

….We took 2,000 tweets from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and captured tweets in half-hour increments. Then we categorized them into 6 buckets:

News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.

Pointless Babble won with a 40% share. “Pointless babble”; i.e. something that wasn’t talking to anyone specific, wasn’t a retweet, didn’t contain a news item and wasn’t spam. Things like “I’m chilling out, watching TV”, for example.

Which makes me wonder. These tweets are about our basic, everyday lives, and those lives are being branded pointless. Lately it seems like unless you are a cog in the machine 24/7, you are… well… pointless. Twitter about your job (as long as it is positive and vaguely schmoozy), network with potential clients or talk about lofty current events, you lazy schlub!

Those tweets tend to be the funny ones. And they seem to be the only things tweeted by celebs… or is it self-promotion for them? The boundaries are a little blurrier than that, I think.

And what about those tweets that cross the categorisation boundaries? Amanda Bonnen made a “Pointless Babble” tweet that later became News. There’s probably a lot more of that on the horizon (so beware if you have a complaint about something!).

I must admit, I was rather surprised – and pleased – at the lack of spam reported by the study! Guess they’ve not had to deal with those darn pr0n ‘stars’.

[via Mashable and various other internet sources.]
[image credit - A Little Bird Told Me by mattknow via HongKiat.com]

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