WEB 1.99 RC 1, Cyberspice, Thursday (NNGadget) — Only 98% of Twitter updates are “pointless babble,” says a new report that studied 2,000 tweets over a period of two weeks.

The top category was “pointless babble” tweets, with nearly 98% of tweets being inanity no sane person could want to read, retweets of inanity, links to inanity, retweets of links to inanity and retweets of retweets of links to links to the reretweet itself. And camera phone pictures of bowel movements on Twitpic.

Almost 2% was Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman or retweets thereof. Most of the rest was Warren Ellis posting scatological abuse of his fans.

Botnet command messages were becoming more popular, many disguised as combinations of the syllables “lol” “wtf” “d00d” “RT” and “#fb” or scatological abuse of Warren Ellis’s fans.

Twitter’s demographics as of June 2009 were 55% female, 43% ages 18 to 34, 78% white, and 99.5% of such short attention spans that Facebook might as well be War and Peace. Botnet readership was considered likely to rise as soon nothing with organic intelligence would be able to cope.

Twitter recently redesigned its homepage, changing the tag “What are you doing now?” to “Post tomorrow’s CNN headlines, particularly about #goatse.”