Twitter, the popular micro-blogging platform, is loaded with pointless messages rather than vital information, according to a new study. Pear Analytics, a San Antonio-based marketing firm, began its study based on the hypothesis that Twitter is "used predominantly for self-promotion." While the site reaches an estimated 27 million people per month in the United States, data shows only 27% of users are on regularly. In fact, Quantcast.com research claims only 1% of users contribute to over 35% of all traffic.

Looking at the kinds of data being created, Pear Analytics grouped messages, or "tweets" into several categories including news (from sources like AHN), spam (from adult websites and other marketing scams), self-promotion, conversation and "pointless babble" (these are the "I am eating a sandwich now" tweets).

According to their survey, over 40% of all tweets are "pointless babble." There is more spam (3.7%) than news (3.6%), with over a third of tweets directed at communication - one of the main ways Twitter advertises itself.

"The results were interesting, and not in the order that we anticipated," Pear Analytics explained. "We thought that both Spam and Self‐Promotion percentages would be much higher... we thought the News category would have more weight than dead last, since this seems to be contrary to Twitter's new position of being the premier source of news and events."