Let's start with a about a study of random tweets by Pear Analytics, which shows some 40 percent of all content on Twitter is "pointless babble."

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To which the obvious reply: ?

Pear conducted this study by dipping into the tweet stream every 30 minutes over a two-week period, and then placing each tweet into one of six categories. Number two behind "babble" was "conversational" (37.5 percent), as in the "I just had a tuna melt and it sure was yummy"; in the third slot at just under 9 percent were tweets containing useful info or links, followed by self-promotional (6 percent) tweets and spam (4 percent).

Think about it, though. Compared to every other communications channel in your life -- phone conversations, email, SMS texts, newspaper articles, blogs, TV newscasts, political speechifying, and so on -- Twitter's pointless babble ratio isn't that bad. Can you honestly say that almost 10 percent of any of those things contains useful info? (If so, maybe you hang out with smarter people than I do.) And who wouldn't kill for a spam rate of only 4 percent? I'm sure that won't last.