Social networking, or “pointless babble?” A new study from Pear Analytics found that pointless babble rules Twitter.

The research company took 2,000 tweets from the public over a two-week period from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. CT, capturing them in half-hour increments. Pear then broke them up into six categories: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value.

Pear said pointless babble finished atop the list, with 40.55% of the total tweets captured, followed closely by conversational at 37.55% and not so closely by pass-along value at 8.7%. The bottom three were self-promotion (5.85%), spam (3.75%) and news (3.6%).

Pear concluded:

With the new face of Twitter, it will be interesting to see if they take a heavier role in news or continue to be a source for people to share their current activities that have little to do with everyone else. We will be conducting this same study every quarter to identify other trends in usage.