The deadline for students applying for Google Summer of Code this year is today, at 19:00 UTC. That’s about 3 hours from now. Still working on your application? Double check your time zone here. No late applications will be accepted.

There are a lot of potential projects on our Ideas list, so if you’ve been hemming and hawing over whether or not to apply, this is your last chance for this year. We have great people lined up to mentor the students, including most of the WordPress lead developers, some dedicated core contributors, plugin developers, the BuddyPress lead developers, etc. Google is providing a great opportunity for both students and the open source projects that act as mentoring organizations (like WordPress), so don’t pass it up if you’re an eligible student.

You can’t win if you don’t play, right? Five thousand bucks for two months of coding over the summer with WordPress hotshots. I know a lot of people that would love that deal. Oh, and hey, student girl wonders of WordPress-land: why haven’t you applied yet?

Apply now! (Don’t forget to use our application template.)

This post is about the @WordPress Twitter account, so if you don’t use Twitter, or don’t care about Twitter, then feel free to take the time you might have spent reading this post to go play outside (or an equivalent) instead.

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!

Scene: A college classroom

Professor: So. Out of the 20 students in the class, half wrote WordPress Summer of Code proposals good enough to receive an A. How many of you are planning to apply for the program?

Jack, a student: I am. They opened applications today.

Sophie, a student: I am. And that sentence was grammatically terrible.

Jack: Shut up.

Chris, a student: I’m not applying.

Jack (to Chris): Chicken?

Sophie: You’re such a jerk! Maybe he has a job lined up or something, did you ever think of that?

Professor: Whoa -

Chris: Actually, I’m going backpacking in Australia with my Dad. No internet for about half the time, and when I emailed the people at WordPress they said I should probably wait until next year to apply and make sure I’d be able to be online through the whole summer.

Professor: Fair enough. The application period opens today at 19:00 UTC and goes through April 9th, so let’s hear from the people who are applying.

Jack: I’m submitting mine today.

Sophie: That’s just stupid.

Andrea, a teacher’s assistant: Hey, that’s not necessary.

Jack: Yeah! The early bird gets the worm, or hadn’t you heard?

Sophie: What I heard was that the WordPress mentors are holding open IRC chats this week to talk to prospective students and give them feedback on proposals and ideas, and that talking directly to the mentors ups your chances of being selected. But I guess you don’t think you need the people who are actually choosing the students to know your name because your proposal is so brilliant?

Jack’s jaw drops.

Jack: Where did you hear that? It wasn’t on the GSoC mailing list.

Sophie: I joined the wp-hackers list and asked all the core contributors for feedback on my idea, and then I emailed 3 potential mentors to see what they thought of it personally. By the time applications are due, I’ll have revised it based on community and mentor feedback, and enough people will know who I am — and that I’m full of initiative — that my chances of being accepted will be much better.

Jack: You think you’re all Felicia Day with your MW2 level 70, but you’re just a computer nerd.

Sophie: Um, duh. We’re in an advanced computer programming class. We’re all computer nerds.

Professor: Now, now. Sophie’s correct; talking to community members and mentors will improve her chances. But, Jack, there’s no reason you can’t join the IRC chats and the mailing list to get your name out there, too, even if you submit your application today. Most proposals get tweaked a bit after the students are chosen anyway.

Sophie: Plus, Felicia Day is awesome! And she uses WordPress, so ha!

End Act II.

Here’s the deal. The application period opens today. Early applications will likely get a bit more attention up front, but it’s also important that your ideas and approach are vetted by the community and the mentors. If you haven’t already, you should join the wp-hackers mailing list and send your proposal to the list for feedback. We’ll also be doing a few IRC chats during the application period to give students a chance to talk directly with the mentors. Note that not every mentor will attend all three chats, so if you want to talk to a specific person, you might want to email them. Please arrive on time to the chats, as they will be scheduled for an hour, and will have to accommodate multiple students. IRC chats will be held at irc.freenode.net in room #wordpress-gsoc.

• Wednesday, March March 31 at 20:30 UTC (4:30pm eastern)
• Saturday, April 3 at 21:30 UTC (5:30pm eastern)
• Wednesday, April 7 at 20:30 UTC (4:30pm eastern)

This chat room will remain open during the application period, and various mentors and community members may be there and able to answer questions, but the scheduled chats are the only official times at which they are scheduled to do so.

Oh, and if you want to help publicize the WordPress summer of code, grab a flyer and post it somewhere on a bulletin board at your local college campus. Professors, don’t forget to encourage your brightest students to apply!

Scene: A college classroom

Professor: Is anyone here applying for Google Summer of Code this year? If so, see me after class to discuss getting independent study credit toward your degree.

Jack, a student: Isn’t that a really hard program to get into? Like, hard like getting to level 70 in Modern Warfare 2?

Sophie, a student: I went past 70, I prestiged.

Jack (turning to Sophie): Shut up, you did not!

Sophie: I did, too!

Professor: Not the point, kids. So who’s going to try for a GSoC spot?

Andrea, a teacher’s assistant: There are some great open source projects participating this year. I’d love to see someone from this class get in on the WordPress project.

Jack: WordPress is awesome, but my friend Billy didn’t get chosen by them last year.

Sophie: Billy’s not as smart as he thinks he is.

Jack: You think you could do better?!

Sophie: Of course I do! Any primate could do better than Billy! Or you, for that matter!

Jack: What? I would so beat you out in a coding competition!

Andrea: Sounds like we have the makings of a friendly classroom competition, Prof.

Professor: I think you’re right, Andrea. Tell you kids what. They announce the students who’ve been accepted on April 26th, which is before the semester ends. Let’s turn this into a class project.

Jack (raising a suspicious eyebrow): How do you mean?

Professor: As a class assignment, everyone has one week to write a project proposal for the Google Summer of Code, specific to the WordPress project. The proposals will be graded like a regular assignment. Anyone who gets an A on the proposal can use me as a reference if they apply with the proposal to WordPress and Google for the program. The application deadline is April 9, so you’ll have time to revise your application after it’s been graded.

Sophie: What’s in it for us?

Andrea: If you’re successful in GSoC you earn $5000 for the summer.

Sophie (smirking, to Jack): That’s more than you’ll make working the hot dog cart by City Hall.

Jack: You wish. I’m totally getting in, and you’ll be on the hot dog cart this year.

Professor: And as I was starting to say in the first place, a GSoC project would qualify for independent study credit. Tell you what, as an added bonus, anyone who actually gets accepted into the WordPress GSoC program will get extra credit points on their year end average.

Sophie (perking up): Really? I’m in!

Jack: No way, they’ll choose me first!

Stay tuned for the continuing adventures of Jack and Sophie as they navigate the course of applying to Google Summer of Code to work with WordPress.

That’s right, WordPress is honored to be among the 150 open source organizations chosen to participate in Google Summer of Code this year. Students work on WordPress projects over the summer under the guidance of mentors from among the WordPress core developers, and if they complete their projects successfully Google pays them $5000! Talk about a win-win. Last year’s projects led to some very cool code being created, like the new search API targeted for version 3.0 and the Elastic theme generator.

Professors: Help us and your students by telling them about GSoC and encouraging them to apply. Consider having them write a WordPress plugin or core patch as a class assignment so they can get to know the codebase. Offer to sign on as an adviser for a summer independent study so they can get credit for their work with GSoC.

Students: Check out our Ideas page, and start thinking about projects you’d like to propose. Watch this space for an announcement of some live chat information sessions where you can ask potential mentors questions and get feedback on your pre-proposal ideas. This program is competitive, but is one of the best opportunities out there when it comes to programming. You get real-world experience as a member of an open source community, you make decent money, you make connections with industry leaders, and you get the attention of Google. Not to mention some serious bragging rights. What are you waiting for? Applications will be accepted from March 29-April 9, so start thinking about a project now!