Shocker: Most tweets are rubbish

This Pear Analytics study on e-marketer indicates a full 40% of tweets worldwide can be classified in the ‘I am eating a sandwich now’ category of pointless babble. A couple of points:

• As a microblogging tool, you'd intuitively expect a fair amount of tweets to only be of interest to the person twittering and her/his followers. Celebrities like Demi Moore's boyfriend will pull in more punters than the local butcher, but setting aside celebrity-obsession and voyeuristic tendencies, who cares that @joeschmuck hates being stuck in traffic/got out early of work/fancies Sarah Palin...

• Pear Analytics’ news category excluded news about technology and social media, which probably significantly skews the results considering Twitter's heavy slant toward tech/social media early adopters. In fact, I've had great results using twitter as a PR platform to reach out and build connections with these early adopters.

Bottom line: I can see Twitter being a great consumer mobile application and possibly getting away with charging a premium for business customers so they operate in a safe broadcasting platform with full analytics etc. For the rest? I'd rather be eating a sandwich than reading tweets about it...