Ah, Twitter, a way to keep in touch with friends, network with industry reps, and pretend people care what your favorite cereal is.

It goes without saying this Internet phenom has grown more quickly than any experts could have predicted.  But as anyone who uses Twitter knows, there's a whole lot of useless crap on there -- and it's not just spam.  At the other end of the spectrum, we have a political movement, with individuals formerly stifled by their governments now speaking freely to a worldwide audience. 

So U.S. market research firm Pear Analytics got curious and did some brief research on the subject.  For a taste, they poked around Twitter every 30 minutes between 11:00 am and 5:00 pm on weekdays for 14 days.  They categorized 2,000 messages into six groups: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational (back-and-forth exchanges between users), and pass-along value.

What they found was that only 8.7 percent of these tweets held "value."  40.5 percent, on the other hand, could be categorized as "pointless babble," which would be tweets like, "I enjoy cat food."  37.5 percent were conversational, 8.7 had pass-along value, while self-promotion and spam took up 5.85 and 3.75 percent of the Twitter-sphere, respectively.

This is just a glimpse of Pear Analytics' work; the firm plans to repeat this process every quarter to track Twitter usage trends.

"With the new face of Twitter, it will be interesting to see if they take a heavier role in news, or continue to be a source for people to share their current activities that have little to do with everyone else," said Ryan Kelly, founder of Pear Analytics.