Twitter is officially rolling out the oft-requested "mute" option. After testing the feature with a small group of users, the company today announced it's in the process of rolling out mute, which lets you silence a particular user in your timeline, to everyone using its Android and iOS apps. Mute will also appear as an option on Twitter.com. "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," Twitter explains.

Muting someone obviously won't prevent them from favoriting, replying to, or retweeting your tweets. But if someone's annoying you, you'll at least no longer be bothered by any of that activity in your main timeline. And best of all, muted users are never told when they've been silenced. Finally there's a more polite alternative to the unfollow. Mute functionality has proven to be a popular feature of third-party Twitter apps and the company's own Tweetdeck client. But we'd recommend you hold off in deleting Tweetbot if you often mute topics or hashtags that are currently popular on the service; Twitter's mute option only silences individual users — not entire conversations.