The site has announced that it is starting to trial a 're-tweet button' on a small percentage of accounts. If it is rolled out across all accounts it is likely that there will be much more 're-tweeting' of news and opinion, which could reach levels even higher than in the recent Jan Moir and Trafigura cases.

At present users have to manually copy and paste status updates, but the feature would allow users to do this at a click of a button. This could mean that re-tweeting becomes much more widespread, with a higher volume of re-tweets and even bigger 'Twitter uprisings' than we have seen so far.

Twitter founder Biz Stone said on the Twitter Blog: "The plan is to see how it goes first with this small release. If it needs more work, then we'll know right away. If things look good, we'll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100%."

He added: "We hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know."

Screenshots of the new feature that is being tested can be found on the Marketing Shindig blog.

Twitter's new re-tweet feature is being tested on a small percentage of accounts. Image: Marketing Shindig

This week it was the turn of Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time to become the hot-topic of twitter, with over a thousand tweets a minute using the #bbcqt hash tag during the programme. Between 11 and 12 on Thursday night 4.8% of all tweets mentioned #bbcqt.

There are several websites that are useful when tracking the most popular topics on twitter. Below are a few that I have tried out. Other useful sites can be found in this article on Mashable, which includes a list of iPhone applications for tracking trends.

What the trend? explains in a concise summary why a word or phrase is on the top trends list. Its explanations have started to be used on the main twitter site for some trending topics. It is a quick tool to find out why certain words are popular on twitter at a particular time.

monitter allows you to track tweets in real time. You choose which keywords you want to monitor and then the site displays the most recent tweets using those words, automatically refreshing. You can simultaneously follow several keywords on different columns, the number of which you can increase and decrease. It is particularly useful when following tweets of live events.

Trendistic provides graphs that show the popularity of keywords over a day, week or month. The charts allow you to see when trends started and how they develop showing the percentage of all tweets which mention particular words each day or each hour.

If you search 'Moir' on 16 October, you can see the growth of the tweeting about Jan Moir's Stephen Gately article through the day. There were boosts after popular twitter users Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown and Stephen Fry started to mention the controversial article at 11:42am, 12:05pm and 12:27pm respectively. However, the charts show that the article had started to become high-profile even before the big-guns started to tweet. 'Moir' was used in 0.19% of tweets between 10 and 11, increased to 0.41% in the hour in which Brooker tweets and then peaked at 0.61% in the hour that Fry and Brown first mentioned Moir. Between 4 and 5pm, 0.23% of all tweets mentioned 'StephenFry'.

Trendistic is also useful for seeing how trends, for topics such as swine flu, change over the long-term.

Trendistic graph showing the percentage of all tweets on twitter including the word 'Moir' on 16 October