Twitter Research: 40% of tweets are pointless babble

Data analytics firm Pear Analytics took 2,000 tweets from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00am to 5:00pm (CST) and captured tweets in half-hour increments. Then they categorized them into 6 buckets:
News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.

1. Pointless Babble won with 40.55% of the total tweets captured ( The kind which say i am eating a burger at mcdonald variety)
2. Conversational was a very close second at 37.55%,
3. Pass-Along Value ( Retweets) was third (albeit a distant third) at 8.7% of the tweets

Source: Pear Analytics