Okay, so, Twitter! When all those apps started popping up using the Twitter API, things like automatically following anyone who followed you and sending an automatic Direct Message seemed like good ideas. We’re all friends, right? Wrong. That auto-follow bit us hard, and the huge amount of spam the account gets means that it’s been nearly impossible to monitor legitimate messages from WordPress users and developers who need to be pointed to a help resource. We’re sorry! Just as we needed to get the Ideas Forum under control* so that it could become a more useful resource for the community, we needed to get rid of the spam clogging our Twitter arteries. Except there was no easy way to do it.

We had wound up following over 50,000 people. If someone went to the @WordPress profile page on Twitter to see the stream of updates from people we followed, almost none of it had anything to do with WordPress or the community. Diet pills, Twitter scams, and multi-posted spam messages were the norm. Yuck! Who else wishes there was Akismet for Twitter? Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to clear this stuff out quickly (mass unfollows trigger their TOS alert, so it’s not surprising). I even contacted Twitter directly to see what the options might be, and it was suggested we use a script to clear the account. To be clear: Twitter flagged our account so that when the script was run they wouldn’t mark us as spammers for violating the TOS with a mass unfollow. We communicated with them beforehand, and the use of scripts to do this is not encouraged. Twitter was doing us a nice favor to help us get our house in order. Thanks, Twitter! Last night I ran the script and removed everyone. Extreme, but in good cause, right?

We’re now starting to re-follow real people from the WordPress community. There will be no more auto-follow. If you are a WordPress developer, designer, blogger, fan site, whatever — and think your tweets should appear in the @WordPress updates stream, then send an @ reply to us and we can add you to the new list (assuming you’re not hawking diet pills, free iPads or ways to get a million followers). This way, people who are new to WordPress and go to check us out on Twitter will (hopefully) get a sense of the vibrant community that we have. People who send @ messages to us won’t (hopefully) wonder indefinitely why they were ignored, because without all the spam, maybe we can use Twitter as it was intended to be used, as another channel of communication.

And for anyone who uses Qwitter and thinks @WordPress stopped loving them because of the last tweet they posted before the script ran… sorry! It wasn’t like that, we swear! It would be nice if the script could have done a bulk DM before the removal, but nope (otherwise we’d have included a message about this). So trust us, we still like you! And if you haven’t already been re-followed, please don’t take it personally… just send an @reply to @WordPress (tell us how you use WordPress!) and we’ll try to get you re-added soon. Later today (hopefully) you’ll find out what’s been keeping us so busy!

*Have you noticed? We cleared out thousands of old threads, added categorization, and will try to keep it to under a hundred open idea threads at a time so that they can be managed in a timely fashion. Check it out and rate some of the new ideas today!

Image Management Tools

Aniga Gallery – Allows you to create picture galleries that use the WordPress comment system.

Batch Image Uploader – Upload and resize multiple images to your blog at once.

Duh Gallery – Simply creates a photo gallery from your uploads folder in WordPress.

ImageManager – Includes interface for browsing and uploading images and basic tools such as cropping and rotating.

WP Image Gallery – Create photo galleries from within WordPress and display them in posts.

fMoblog – Post pictures with descriptions from a mobile phone.

Pop-up Image Gallery – Photo gallery plugin with various options for transitions

PhotoZip – For quickly uploading photos; allows you to simply upload a .zip file to create an image gallery.

PictPress – Automatically generates a picture post from a directory on your server. Resizes pictures on the fly.

Importing Images from Other Services

Another Flickr – Allows your readers to browse thumbnails from your Flickr albums and go directly to full size images.

BubbleShare – Display photo galleries from your BubbleShare account.

Facebook Photos – Shows thumbnails of photos from your linked Facebook account.

Flickr Photo Album – Pulls in your Flickr photo sets and displays them as albums in WordPress.

FlickrRSS – Displays most recent images from any RSS feed from Flickr such as a user, group, or tags page.

Fotobook – Import your Facebook photo albums into a WordPress page.

ImageShack Uploader – Upload an image to ImageShack’s free storage service and insert a thumbnail into your posts.

Slickr Gallery – AJAX photo gallery that pulls in images and photosets from Flickr.

Smugmug Gallery Bar – Insert photos from your Smugmug account into blog posts.

Image Display Effects & Hacks

Enlarger – Displays a thumbnail but loads the bigger image in the background so when clicked the full size version loads instantly.

IImage Panorama – Helps you create a 360 degree panorama picture to add to your blog.

Image Headlines – Create cool text images for the titles of your posts.

Lightbox 2 – Generates thumbnails that when clicked load in a lightbox.

Multi-Topic Icon: Shows images that represent each of the categories assigned to a blog post.

Random Image – Pulls a random image you have places on your blog and links back to the post it came from.

Transparent PNG Fix – Make sure your PNG files don’t look nasty.

WP Wetfloor – Create the ever-popular reflection effect for the images on your blog.

Playing Music

Del.icio.us MP3 Player – Makes links to MP3s in your posts playable and easily postable to del.icio.us.

Audio Player – Inserts a simple MP3 player into your posts that plays uploaded audio files.

XSFP Player – Flash player that allows you to embed music on your blog via http.

What Am I Listening To?

DG PlayingNow Updater – Displays the song you are currently listening to on iTunes, MSN Messenger, or J. River Media Center.

EZ-Scrobbler – Displays your most recently listened to tracks on last.fm.

iTunes Spy – Displays your most recently listened to tracks on iTunes.

Pandora Feeds – Displays data from Pandora feeds, for example, a list of your stations, bookmarked songs, and bookmarked artists.

onAirNow – Now playing plugin that displays most recent song from iTunes or WinAmp.

Podcasting Tools

Odeo – Embed a podcast you’ve recorded on Odeo.

Podcast Release – A “release” form for guests of your podcast, accepting your terms.

PodPress – Full featured plugin for podcasters including feed generation, iTunes preview, and download stats.

iPodCatter – Helps podcasters created a valid feed for the podcast directory on iTunes.

Miscellaneous Audio Tools

Evoca Browser Mic – Allow your blog readers to send you voice comments which you can later post to your blog.

Odiogo – Converts your text to speech and provides a link for your readers to listen to your posts.

Video Tools

Anarchy Media Player – Plays a wide variety of audio/video file formats in the appropriate player on your blog.

Easy Inline SWF – Allows you to insert Flash files in .swf format into your posts without any weird tags.

SeeTheFace – Complete tool for recording video and posting to your blog.

Extreme Video – Plays any .flv file on your blog with support for YouTube, Google Video, Quicktime, and more.

Noembedder – Automatically adds a noembed section to any embedded content that does not already have one.

YouTube Brackets – Allows you to simply enter a URL for a YouTube video versus copying and pasting embed code.

wordTube – Video player that includes the ability to program a menu of videos.

TubePress – Display YouTube galleries as blog posts or a sidebar item.

YouTube Video Gallery – Displays thumbnails for any gallery from YouTube.

vPIP – vPIP stands for “Videos Playing In Place,” meaning it will only embed after a specified image or link is clicked by the user.