MANILA, Philippines?Nearly half of the message being posted on the widely popular Twitter is ?pointless babble,? or so claims research firm Pear Analytics in its recent study about the popular microblogging site.

Other than being pointless talk, Pear Analytics also discovered that over one-third of Twitter messages has conversational value, or when people actually exchange ideas.

Third most used purpose of Twitter is pass-along value, or when tweets are become re-tweets (RT).

About five percent of tweets are for self-promotion while only three percent of tweets are actually related to news.

Luckily, only three percent of tweets are spam.

The study randomly sampled only tweets from the United States. The company sampled about 200 tweets per day for two weeks, reaching a total of 2,000 tweets sampled.

In his blog post Pear Analytics, Pear Analystics CEO Ryan Kelly stated that the study came about after employees in their office debated on how Twitter is really being used.

He said that with the result, they are interested to see if there would be a change in using Twitter for news or if it will remain to be a source of personal messages that have little use to others.

Kelly also suggested using filtering tools, such as Philtro to narrow down the type of tweets that people receive.

?We will be conducting this same study every quarter to identify other trends in usage,? Kelly said.