A study from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology has found that most microbloggers are updating their status with "mundane" messages.
Curiously, the Finnish institute chose to examine the also-ran microblogging platform Jaiku. In sifting through 400,000 messages on Jaiku, HIIT found that the most common messages users send out include the words "working," "home," "work," "lunch," and "sleeping."
"Microblogging works because of the total control users have over their postings, but it is a hobby that seems to require a significant investment of time which many cannot afford," the Institute said in a statement.
Jaiku is now a shadow of its former self, some two years after it was acquired by Google. According to the site's About page, it's "maintained by volunteer Google engineers on their spare time," after the Web giant decided at the start of the year that a half-dozen products including Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Google Video weren't contributing to its brand or bottom line. In March, the service was moved to Google's App Engine. The company also open sourced its code base, putting the future of the service "in developer hands."
...we took 2,000 tweets from the public timeline (in English and in the US) over a 2-week period from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and captured tweets in half-hour increments. Then we categorized them into 6 buckets:
News, Spam, Self-Promotion, Pointless Babble, Conversational and Pass-Along Value.
…
The results were interesting. As you may have guessed, Pointless Babble won with 40.55% of the total tweets captured; however, Conversational was a very close second at 37.55%, and Pass-Along Value was third (albeit a distant third) at 8.7% of the tweets captured.
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