A recent study confirms it: Twitter is the biggest BS of recent years, hyped by the mai stream media but no one understands why they are hyping it.

Like Larry King of CNN. This man never touched a computer keyboard, has never seen a web page and yet he plugs his Twitter page every night at 9 PM.

HubSpot released its June 2009 State of the Twittersphere (http://bit.ly/SOTblog0609) (Twitter hashtag: #SOTwitter) report, analyzing data from more than 4.5 million Twitter accounts over a nine month period to measure Twitter growth and report statistics on tweets, the Twitter user base and user geography. The study finds that despite obvious growth in the number of Twitter accounts, over nine percent of Twitter users are inactive.

While the Wall Street Journal reports that the number of Twitter accounts has grown to 32.1 million from 1.6 million a year ago, the HubSpot State of the Twittersphere study reports low activity levels for a significant number of users.

55.5% of users are not following anyone
54.9% have never tweeted
52.71% have no followers

This is HubSpot's second State of the Twittersphere report and is based on data gathered from Twitter Grader, one of HubSpot's free marketing tools that measures the power and authority of Twitter accounts based on factors such as number of followers, reach and frequency of updates. The study uses data from the past nine months on a pool of over 4.5 million users who have evaluated their accounts using Twitter Grader.

"Recently, there has been a lot of buzz from mainstream media about the growth of Twitter," said Brian Halligan, CEO and co-founder of HubSpot. "However, the June 2009 State of the Twittersphere points out that people may not be using Twitter to its full potential. If new users aren't really engaged, should it really be considered growth?"

• Monetizing Twitter