A new Twitter study by San Antonio Web data analytics firm Pearanalytics confirmed what many talk show hosts have been joking about: there's a lot of pointless prattle going on in the microblogging sphere.

After randomly sampling a public timeline of tweets - 140 character comments on Twitter - for 10 days, Pearanalytics found that 40.5 percent of the updates fell in the "pointless babble" category. An example: "I am eating a sandwich now."

Other findings:

- 37.5 percent of the comments were conversational - a back-and-forth discussion on a topic

- 8.7 percent had pass-along value - tweets that were re-broadcast or re-tweeted

- 5.8 percent were self-promotional

- 3.75 percent were spam - the equivalent of junk mail

- 3.6 percent were news

"Our initial hypothesis that we intended to prove was that Twitter was being used predominantly for self-promotion. Our data showed this was not the case," says Ryan Kelly, founder and CEO of Pearanalytics. "I was most surprised that the news factor was so low."

About an hour after Kelly posted the results of his study and white paper yesterday, global online technology news blog "Mashable" ran an article and the study became one of the top trending issues of the day. Twitter reaches 27 million people per month in the U.S., according to Quantcast.com

"We're experiencing about 100 visitors per hour to our Web site right now," Kelly adds.

Pearanalytics recently was funded by a private investment group and is working on a new product set for debut in October, Kelly says.