Per Matt's request, I held this under embargo until he started his address - may need to update wiht more facts once he explains the whole story
One of the things that struck me when I started using WordPress was that the Plugin and Theme universe was extremely vast. So vast, that I could never tell very easily which Plugin I should use, especially when there are 7 flavors of "recent comments". So at the first WordCamp (or sometime around there) I was talking with Matt Mullenweg about this need.
I was thinking this might be a neat side business as a site to run, but Matt told me about this idea that he just announced as a reality during the "State of the Word" today - where WordPress would be actually looking at the statistics of which plugins people are actually using, rather than what people explicitly rate. This is a unique side benefit of the auto-update feature of the latest version of WordPress.
This new reality opens a new path to easier WordPress configuration. More importantly, it is a path to learning our collective best practices, doing what Web 2.0 and Social Media is best at, making things visible that previously were not.
While I anticipate some people in a privacy uproar over this, I don't really see a problem with the fact that they have been collecting these statistics. The reason is very simple. I know Matt personally. I know Tony personally. I trust them to do the right thing. I trust they thought of this issue. In fact, when Matt told me about this announcement a short while ago, we both laughed nervously and expressed that, "oh shit, what are people gonna say when they find this out" look to each other.
This is just so cool, I am so happy to finally be able to see what other WordPress users are doing with their plugins. In fact, on the way here to WordCamp, I twittered a question for the people in attendance, asking which are the essential plugins? The answers I got are below. The real answers will soon be seen through WordPress' new feature - I can't wait to play with it...
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jjtoothman: @chrisheuer wrote a post on that exact subject earlier this week: http://snurl.com/3fqrj (expand)about 1 hour ago · View Tweet
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thornley: @chrisheuer Essential WordPress plug http://www.friendsroll.com - at least I'd like it to become essentialabout 1 hour ago · View Tweet
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mabernathy: @chrisheuer headspace 2about 1 hour ago · View Tweet
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sfdesigner: @chrisheuer CodeBox for me - I blog about coding and teach programming, so it is essential for me.about 2 hours ago · View Tweet
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chrisheuer: Hey #wordcamp, quick poll - what are your essential plugins? Compiling a list for @socialmediaclubabout 2 hours ago · View Tweet
Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordcamp, plugins,
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