There is surely no better way to enjoy a grand prix than in the company of like-minded people. This year several websites and blogs are promising to offer “live comment” and chat facilities.

F1Fanatic will be trying out a live comments system from tonight. Sidepodcast has also been running comment threads.

Formula1Blog.com is taking a different approach, running a group chat in MSN Messenger. That could be good for a lot of people although I find group chats in MSN (and, in fairness, chat rooms in general) a bit overwhelming.

Forumula1 also has a chat room if you are that way inclined.

Last year I experimented with ‘liveblogging’ over Twitter. I will continue to do that throughout the season whenever I can, starting from tonight’s qualifying session!

I absolutely love Twitter. It does not suffer from the same problem that chatrooms have, where you are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of chat, or there is some jerk who you would really rather ignore. You have to add people as a friend on Twitter before you receive anyone’s messages. But if you add a few F1 fans you can see the talking points emerge and mutual friends can get into interesting discussions.

If you don’t already use Twitter, I would highly recommend it. I will be Twittering away throughout tonight’s qualifying session, so go ahead and add vee8, and I will probably add you back.

If anyone else is planning on using Twitter to discuss F1 action as it happens, do let me know in the comments.

And if you’ve never heard of Twitter, here is a really neat video explaining how it works. This video focuses on the wider uses of Twitter.