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It has become a common problem on Twitter - during major  sports events or TV shows, your feed can become overwhelmed with updates from over enthusiastic friends tweeting incessantly.

Twitter today launched a solution - a mute button for users.

Available to all users from today, the feature can mute irritating or boring tweets temporarily, rather than blocking the account completely.

Reports emerged today Twitter is also trialling a mute option on its apps. Users said they spotted the feature on iOS and Android devices as well as Tweetdeck, pictured. The tool lets people silence users temporarily, but does not block them from sending notifications and direct messages

'Today we're beginning to introduce a new account feature called mute to people who use our iPhone and Android apps and twitter.com,' the firm said.

'Mute gives you even more control over the content you see on Twitter by letting you remove a user's content from key parts of your Twitter experience.'

Muting a user on Twitter means their Tweets and Retweets will no longer be visible in your home timeline, and you will no longer receive push or SMS notifications from that user.

'In the same way you can turn on device notifications so you never miss a Tweet from your favorite users, you can now mute users you'd like to hear from less,' Twitter promised.

The muted user will still be able to fave, reply to, and retweet your Tweets; you just won't see any of that activity in your timeline. 

Twitter also stressed the mute feature was secret.

'The muted user will not know that you've muted them, and of course you can unmute at any time.'

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, pictured, made the comments during an interview with Bloomberg. He said the site was looking at introducing a 'whisper mode' that would let groups of Twitter users to talk in private - similar to direct messages but for more people

CEO Dick Costolo also hinted at introducing a 'whisper mode' for private conversations.

Costolo made the comments during an interview with Bloomberg earlier this week.

'There are frequently public conversations that you would like to grab hold of and take into whisper mode.

Being able to move fluidly between that public conversation and the private conversation is something we'll make simpler.' 

Private conversations are already possible using direct messages (DMs), but these only apply to one-on-one discussions.

Whisper mode would effectively be a group version of DMs.

Twitter constantly experiments and rolls out features that don't always end up becoming permanent features.

Meanwhile, the mute button started appearing across iOS and Android devices on the official Twitter app, as well as Tweetdeck, earlier today.

Users have been tweeting screenshots of the tool, that lets users silence specific tweeters in a timeline. It only appears to have been rolled out to a select few.

The main difference between the mute tool and the block function is that notifications and direct messages from muted users will still appear.

Twitter constantly experiments and rolls out features that don't always end up becoming permanent features.

When asked about Twitter testing, Costolo said: 'In our latest iOS or Android apps, there are well over 100 experiments running in each of those apps.'