It turns out that 24% of all tweets are not generated by people, but rather by bots! But not to worry, these are not all spam bots. You might even be using a ‘bot’ yourself! You know, those wonderful tools that allow you to send out a tweet when you post to your blog. That is a bot.

I have no problem with these updates; part of twitter is exploring the internet using shared information. A report conducted by sysomos.com had a number of findings, most interestingly:

We found that 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day. The actual percentage of machine-generated tweets among the most active users is probably higher than 32% because there many bots that update less than 150 times/day.

The report also outlines who tweets the most. There is a few of what you would expect such as @foxnews (no comment), @nytimes. An more interestingly @alyssa_milano!

Do you use a tweet bot to send out your blog updates? I know I do! The full report here makes for some interesting reading, sadly Ireland does not make the list of Twitter’s 5% of most active users.