Study: One quarter of tweets 'worthless'

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- Twitter users say they find almost a quarter of tweets not worth reading and only slightly more than a third are worthwhile, a U.S. study found.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology surveyed Twitter users in an attempt to discover ways to improve the quality and usefulness of tweets.

"If we understood what is worth reading and why, we might design better tools for presenting and filtering content, as well as help people understand the expectations of other users," Paul Andree in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute said in a Carnegie release Wednesday.

Twitter says more than 200 million tweets are sent each day but most users get little feedback about the messages they send

The researchers created a Web site, "Who Gives a Tweet?," to collect reader evaluations of tweets.

Over a period of 19 days in late 2010 and early 2011, 1,443 visitors to the site rated 43,738 tweets from the accounts of 21,014 Twitter users they followed.

Those participating liked just 36 percent of the tweets and disliked 25 percent, while 39 percent garnered no strong opinion, researchers said.

"A well received tweet is not all that common," MIT researcher Michael Bernstein said. "A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons."

Tweets that were part of someone Else's conversation or updates around current mood or activity were the most strongly disliked, while tweets that included questions to followers, information sharing or links to further content were more often liked, researchers found.