If you have been wondering how "useful" Twitter really is, you might want to hear this. A recent study by marketing Intelligence firm Pear Analytics says that most tweets on Twitter belong to the category of "pointless babble" where people simply post "pointless" stuff like what they're eating now or say "I am in the loo" now. Now, if you are a regular Twitter user and are disheartened by this report, the saving grace is that 37 percent of the tweets are conversational in nature. So, it's not all pointless after all!

Twitter was, in the past, also criticized by many for being used as a tool for "self promotion". The survey has blown away these assumptions to smithereens where only 5.85 percent of the tweets were actually found to be of promotional nature. Self-promotional includes advertisements, promos and corporate tweets. The survey was carried out over a two-week period where almost 2000 tweets from the public time line were analyzed. These "captured" tweets were then categorized in broad categories that included news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value. Thankfully, the spam problem even though is bad enough (and annoying), still does not account for a major share.

While the survey might get the number right about the percentage of tweets being of a particular nature, we have a different take on this. To start off with, most regular users do not happen to check the public timeline, which is simply put, overwhelming. Users choose whom they want to follow. So, those who are guilty of the so called pointless babble, can simply be unfollowed. Besides, what is pointless to you might not exactly be pointless to the others. The survey does, however, give us an idea of what people talk about on Twitter and how it is being used - and, that basically was the intention, we believe.