Communications of the ACM
Quarter of Tweets Not Worth Reading, Twitter Users Tell Researchers
Credit: Twitter
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Georgia Institute of Technology found that Twitter users rate only about a third of the tweets they receive as worthwhile. "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," says Carnegie Mellon's Paul Andre.
The researchers created a Web site to evaluate tweets, and over a period of 19 days 1,443 visitors to the site rated 43,738 tweets from the accounts of 21,014 Twitter users they followed. The study found that Twitter users liked just 36 percent of the tweets and disliked 25 percent. However, the study participants were not fully representative of Twitter users, as most were referred to the study by technology-focused friends and Web sites and could be categorized as users who value sharing links and content.
"Other groups within Twitter may value different types of tweets for entirely different reasons," says Georgia Tech's Kurt Luther. Andre says it could be possible to develop applications that can learn a user's preferences and filter out unwanted content.
From Carnegie Mellon News
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