A Quarter of all Tweets are not worth reading, says study
on February 5th, 2012 
Twitter’s 140 character messages can be packed with insightful ideas or mindless chatter. A recent study points out that out of the 200 million+ tweets that users send on Twitter, only a few are worth reading.
The study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology points out that a little more than a third of the tweets are worth reading and one out of four tweets turn out to be completely worthless.
“If we understood what is worth reading and why, we might design better tools for presenting and filtering content, as well as help people understand the expectations of other users,” said Paul Andre, a post-doctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and lead author of the study.
Paul Andre and his colleagues – Michael Bernstein and Kurt Luther, doctoral students at MIT and Georgia Tech, respectively – created a website, “Who Gives a Tweet?” to collect reader evaluations of tweets. People who visited the “Who Gives a Tweet” site were promised feedback on their tweets if they agreed to anonymously rate tweets by Twitter users they were following. Over a period of 19 days in late 2010 and early 2011, 1,443 visitors rated 43,738 tweets from the accounts of 21,014 Twitter users they followed. The readers liked just 36 percent of the tweets and disliked 25 percent.
“A well received tweet is not all that common. A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons,” Bernstein added.
The study revealed that the tweets including questions to followers, some useful information and self-promotion (such as links to content the writer had created) were more liked, while tweets that included updates around current mood or activity were strongly disliked.
Twitter users may use the micro-blogging platform with different goals – to find interesting information, to share valuable links, to connect with like minded people and to converse with friends and followers. The study points out that Facebook may be the best social platform for sharing personal thoughts and having conversations with friends, while Twitter may be better suited to find and share valuable news and information. What do you think?
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