Rutgers University Professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase set out to analyze the content and characteristics of social media activity. They dubbed communications systems like Facebook and Twitter, "social awareness streams," and then took to examining user behavior.

After dissecting over 3,000 tweets from more than 350 Twitter users' status updates the professors concluded that 80% of users are "meformers," or "Me Now" status updaters.

Meformers are "people who use the platform to post updates on their everyday activities, social lives, feelings, thoughts, and emotions." The rest (20%) are informers who use the channels to share informational updates like links news articles.

The research and methodology was carefully documented (see below), and in their analysis the professors distinguished 9 different types of tweets. Categories include information sharing, self promotion, opinions and complaints, statements and random thoughts, me now, question to followers, presence maintenance, self-referential anecdotes, and anecdotes about others. In the coding part of the process, researchers were able to attribute tweets to multiple categories. They also ensured that tweets were independently analyzed by two different parties to eliminate errors.

Based on the categories and complex cluster analysis, the professors were able to lump Twitterers into one of two categories: meformers or informers. The former makes up 80% of the user base, while the latter a meager 20%. Interesting enough, though, the study also showed that the informers have significantly more friends and followers than their meformer counterparts. The median informer has 131 friends and 112 followers, while the median meformer has just 61 friends and 43 followers.

Although not portraying the average Twitterer in a glamorous the light, the research seems to line up with other surveys, studies, and reports on the micro medium. It's even more unflattering then the San Diego State research that showed young people believe social media is for narcissists. It doesn't go so far as to say we tweet pointless babble, but it did find that 41% of all messages fall in the "Me now" category, which does correspond with the earlier study that claimed 40% of all tweets are pointless babble.

You can read the entire report below, but here are a few additional interesting findings from the Twitter research:

- Informers have a higher proportion of mentions of other users in their messages (that is they @reply to more Twitterers) - 25% of messages come from mobile phones - 51% of mobile-posted messages are "me now" messages, compared to the 37% of "me now" messages posted from non-mobile applications

Image from verymissberry on Flickr