The Pear Analytics Twitter “babble”
August 18, 2009 by Dave Earley
Filed under Media, Social Networking
This is just a collection of relevant links about the study that claimed 40% of Twitter is just “babble”. To be clear from the outset, the study is flawed, or full of crap.
Had anyone read the original blog post, it would have been plainly obvious the Pear Analytics study was just a shill for some Twitter attention management company who promise to remove all that pesky “babble”.
MSNBC outed it on August 14 as a crock, three days before general mainstream media picked it up.
Stephen Dann tore it apart on his blog, giving a scathing breakdown of each failure in methodology. Pear Analytics employee Sarah, who worked on the study, responds at length in comments – confirming the study was a crock.
Stilgherrian wrote on it in Crikey today.
And from Greg Williams and Derek Barry came these links on Twitter.
Trivial tweeting was written as part of an academic discussion on July 2, well before the Pear Analytics study. It’s by Cornelius Puschmann from the department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Duesseldorf.
Finally Danah Boyd wrote Twitter: “pointless babble” or peripheral awareness + social grooming?
As an example of things that could be categorised as News on Twitter, one of the arguments above contained a link to the original Hudson River tweet. The reason I include it here is because of the popularity of the image – the accompanying Twitpic is closing in on half a million views.
