Researchers at Carnegie Mellon U., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Georgia Institute of Technology found that Twitter users say only about a third of the tweets they receive are worth reading.

According to Twitter’s website, more than 200 million tweets are sent each day. However, most users get little feedback about the messages they send, except when their tweets are retweeted by their followers or when people opt to stop following them.

“If we understood what is worth reading and why,” said Paul André, a postdoctoral fellow in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and lead author of the study, in a university press release, “we might design better tools for presenting and filtering content, as well as help people understand the expectations of other users.”

André worked with his colleagues — Michael Bernstein and Kurt Luther, doctoral students at MIT and Georgia Tech, respectively — to create “Who Gives a Tweet?”: a website that collects readers’ evaluations of tweets.

Those who have visited André and his team’s website were promised feedback on their tweets if they agreed to anonymously rate tweets by the users they were already following. Over a period of 19 days in late 2010 and early 2011, 1,443 visitors to the site rated 43,738 tweets from the accounts of 21,014 Twitter users they followed.

Overall, the readers liked just 36 percent of the tweets and disliked 25 percent, while another 39 percent elicited no strong opinion.
The researchers will present their work next Monday at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Seattle.