We've been keeping our eye on Twitter as more and more F1 drivers gradually make their appearance on there. It was Piquet who really seemed to open the floodgates for the social networking trend, and Rubens Barrichello soon followed. We lapped up the Twitpic photographs from the driver's parade lap, and Rubens was particularly good at sharing news about Massa when he was initially recovering from his incident.

Inside information is good.

Jenson Button soon followed, and although Piquet is no longer an F1 driver, his replacement Romain Grosjean has already signed up to Twitter and has been plugged by Renault already.

Tonight we saw the next step in the Twitter story, and it was an amazing thing to watch occur. Sebastian Vettel signed up under the username @real_Vettel, but just putting the word 'real' into your name doesn't make it true. There are many, many fake accounts out there (some of them hilarious) but it does make it hard to know who to trust on Twitter, especially when you're talking about public figures.

That's where Jenson Button comes in. We've already established that the Brit is the real deal, and he and Vettel had the following conversation:

What's the name of your trainer?!

JensonButton

Tommi Parmakoski!

real_Vettel

Jenson confirmed that this Vettel does indeed know what he's talking about. I'm not convinced, because it can't be that hard to do a search and find this information. However, if Mr B thinks he's the real thing, then I believe him. Vettel is on Twitter! Granted, the spelling leaves a little to be desired, but it's nice that Der Seb is tweeting in English in the first place.

To keep track of the drivers that are around so far, we've created a special Friendfeed, erm, feed, which pipes in each of their Twitter accounts. It's slightly confusing because the icon is the same for every driver, and you need to hover over the bit that says Twitter to see who has posted each Tweet. However, if you're looking for a way to separate out the genuine from the fake, this may be of some use.

Similarly, if you'd like to add a couple of F1 drivers as friends on twitter, they can be found here:

• Rubens Barrichello
• Jenson Button
• Romain Grosjean

We've seen people starting to tweet their progress during the sessions. We've even seen a few pictures tweeted from inside the cars themselves. How long before the drivers ask for Twitter integrated into their dashboard? Perhaps they'll start conversing with each other during the drivers parade? All in all, more access to drivers is good, and I hope more join in the fun soon.

Update: After initially questioning the validity of @real_Vettel, Dank from The Red Bullog did some digging and discovered that the tweeter in question was not actually Sebastian Vettel at all. You can read more on the story on Dank's site.

That leaves us with just three active F1 drivers using Twitter right now.