Okay, my friends, the twitter statisticians and rule makers have finally gotten me a little hot under the collar. They have now defined “status updates,” where you tell what you are doing on Twitter, i.e. “I am watching my teenage sons struggle against their father for the TV remote control,” as “pointless babble.”

Attention Pear Analytics, “status updates” are what Twitter was born doing, and, albeit that these days status updates have slipped to being the minority of tweets (41%) they are not “mindless babble,” they are the core of Twitter’s meaning. Like phonics being necessary before a child can read, status updates are needed before you learn to retweet, reply, link and network. Beginning twitterers use them a lot, and experienced twitterers too like to say what they are doing, too, as long as it’s perceived as funny and relevant.

Okay, now that I’ve calmed down (you see, I make a lot of status updates, and so the idea that my tweets are “mindless babble” was bound to get me going) here  is the  breakdown of the Pear Analytics research on types of Tweets:

“Pointless babble “40.55%

Conversational 37.55%,

Pass-Along Value  8.7%

Self-promotion 5.8%

Spam 3.7%

News 3.6%

The news story: Twitter Filled with “Pointless Babble.”

The entire white paper from Pear Analytics (this is actually a great resource which answers a number of questions, such as the proportion of “dead” (or inactive) accounts.