The Gimcrack Miscellany

Study: 8.7% of Tweets Have Pass-Along Value

Posted on 17. Aug, 2009 by The Gimcracker in Twitter Sucks

Twitter is a black hole. It is a singularity event. And it has been scientifically proven. I realize the image I made doesn’t make sense because the Twitter bird should be the actual black hole, not being sucked into it. So? Why don’t you go tweet about it.

This study done by Pear Analytics shows that most Twitter Tweets are meaningless and have no pass-along value. In fact, 40.5% of Tweets are classified as “Pointless Babble”, which is what I hate most about Twitter. “I just woke up and it’s raining outside.” Well whoopty-freaking-do. Tweeting something like that means only one of two things (as has been discussed quite frequently at TGM before – lol): 1) you have no real friends to tell, or 2) your ego is so big that you think people actually care.

So how is Twitter a black hole? You’re about to find out.

OK, so that takes care of 40.5% of Tweets that come from Twitter. What makes up the other 60%? According to the study, 37.5% is conversational, which is fine but begs the question, which part of having a conversation with another person merits a public announcement? I’ve never understood the conversational piece of Twitter. Hey Biz Stone, I don’t know if you are aware but a while back they invented some neat things called “instant messaging” and “private message inboxes”.

We’re now up to 77.5%. What’s left? Spam is 3.75% and self-promotion is 5.85%. That takes us to 87%. If you’re on Twitter you’re using a product that is scientifically 87% worthless. I don’t know what you did in life to get to where you are now. I don’t know what choices you made that led up to you creating an account on Twitter. All I can do is guide you back to real life and help you to understand that Twitter is at least 87% bad for you. If I told you the next episode of Mad Men was going to be 8 minutes of episode and 52 minutes of commercials, would you watch it? I guess it depends on how big a fan of Mad Men you are…

Of the remaining 13% of activity on Twitter, the study is not quite clear. It says that 8.7% was deemed to have “pass-along” value, but it does not indicate what comprises of the last 4% or so. The only theory I can come up with is that Twitter itself is such a black hole of filth that it doesn’t even equal up to 100% of itself. By the time you are able to account for all of the individual components of Twitter, a singularity occurs and the thing itself has distorted and shifted into a lesser thing.

The sum of the parts of Twitter is greater than the whole.

-The Gimcracker