Quarter of Tweets Not Worth Reading, Twitter Users Tell Researchers

Study at CMU, MIT, Georgia Tech Finds Nine Ways To Improve Tweets. Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 / bspice [a] cs.cmu (p) edu PITTSBURGH—Twitter users choose the microblogs they follow, but that doesn't mean they always like what they get. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology found that users say only a little more than a third of the tweets they receive are worthwhile. Other tweets are either so-so or, in one out of four cases, not worth reading at all. Twitter says more than 200 million tweets are sent each day, yet most users get little feedback about the messages they send besides occasional retweets by followers, or when followers opt to stop following them. "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," said Paul André , a post-doctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and lead author of the study. He and his colleagues — Michael Bernstein and Kurt Luther, doctoral students at MIT and Georgia Tech, respectively — created a website, "Who Gives a Tweet?" to collect reader evaluations of tweets.