03/02/2012

A quarter of the 200 million tweets sent each day on the micro blogging platform Twitter are "not worth reading at all", according to new research.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Georgia Institute of Technology created a website, 'Who Gives a Tweet?' to collect reader evaluations of tweets.

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

Overall, only 36 percent of the tweets were liked, while a further 25 percent were disliked.

Paul André, a post-doctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and lead author, said: "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."

Twitter has over 100 million 'active' users worldwide who log in at least once a month.