According to a study conducted by a US market research firm, forty percent of the 140 character Twitter tweets are “pointless babble”.

After randomly sampling a public timeline of tweets for 10 days, Pear Analytics found that 40.5 percent of the updates fell in the “pointless babble” category (as nn example pointless tweet: “I am eating a sandwich now”).

The Twitter service has always been very much like USENET newsgroups, and this finding shares a new similarity: combating useless comments alongside spam.

All of this pointless babble, however, does not prove that Twitter is a failure. In fact, it may ensure just the opposite.

Twitter shares some key traits with other, historically successful, online services. It has captured the public imagination, it is accessible, easy to use, and highly malleable.

Other findings in the Twitter study:

• 37.5 percent of the comments were conversational — a back-and-forth discussion on a topic
• 8.7 percent had pass-along value — tweets that were re-broadcast or re-tweeted
• 5.8 percent were self-promotional
• 3.75 percent were spam — the equivalent of junk mail
• 3.6 percent were news

The researchers also found that conversational peaked between 2.00pm and 2.30pm, and again at 4pm to 4.30pm, with pointless babble peaking between 2.30pm and 3pm.

Apparently, the best days for news and conversation are Tuesdays. By Thursdays, though, Tweeters have descended into babble and spam.

Strangely the researchers did not consider what happened over the weekends, presumably because they think the Twitterites would be out rock climbing or mountain biking. This seems unlikely though when so much of Twitter concerns sandwiches.