diff --git a/scrapy/__init__.py b/scrapy/__init__.py
index 0051aa75e..2ecc7749c 100644
--- a/scrapy/__init__.py
+++ b/scrapy/__init__.py
@@ -5,12 +5,15 @@ Scrapy - a screen scraping framework written in Python
 version_info = (0, 8, 0, '', 0)
 __version__ = "0.8"
 
-import sys, os
+import sys, os, warnings
 
 if sys.version_info < (2,5):
     print "Scrapy %s requires Python 2.5 or above" % __version__
     sys.exit(1)
 
+# ignore noisy twisted deprecation warnings
+warnings.filterwarnings('ignore', category=DeprecationWarning, module='twisted')
+
 # monkey patches to fix external library issues
 from scrapy.xlib import twisted_250_monkeypatches