Is Subscribing too hard?
Scoble reports from the Blog Business Summit:
At the Blog Business Summit yesterday we discovered just how bad RSS usability sucks. Molly Holzschalg was on stage with me and visited a blog and was trying to find its RSS feed. She couldn’t find it. Why? Cause there’s no consistency in this industry on how to subscribe.
Some sites use RSS icons. Most that I visit use the orange XML icon. But other sites don’t have any icon and instead use words like “subscribe” or “feed” or “web feed.”
Even others, like many Blogger sites, don’t have any icon or word with a link at all. For those you’ve gotta know to simply add “atom.xml” onto the end of the URL. Aaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh.
The icons are for the minority of the audience that knows what they are. Most people are going to interact with RSS in one of two ways:
- Their favorite browser will do auto-discovery for them, and offer to subscribe for them
- They'll try to subscribe (in their aggregator) to the main page, and the aggregator will do auto-discovery for them. BottomFeeder does the latter already; is there an aggregator out there that doesn't?
No one (with the possible exception of Dave Winer) expects people to look for orange icons. One way or another, they expect to have the "right thing" just happen.
Comments
Amen
[ Troy Brumley] October 30, 2005 17:43:42.047
Comment by Troy Brumley
I know what a feed is, obviously, and I still prefer that my browser detect this for me. Safari does it quite well.
Is Subscribing too hard?
[ Alan Knight] October 30, 2005 17:44:14.484
Comment by Alan Knight
Interesting. I knew nothing about either of those mechanisms, and have certainly spent time trying to figure out where to get the RSS feed from. I certainly wouldn't have guessed to try and subscribe to an HTML page and have it figure out what to do.
[Carl Gundel] October 31, 2005 9:29:04.185
I don't expect my browser to automatically subscribe me to RSS feeds, but I must admit that it took me a long time to really understand what RSS is, and what that XML icon is for. It seemed like everybody who was trumpeting RSS was neglecting to explain what is actually is and how to use it. Or, perhaps I just didn't have the leftover cycles to devote to figuring it out.
Cut and paste bad
[Troy Brumley] October 31, 2005 10:51:16.101
I don't like the cut and paste approach that I gather most people (non Mac users) have to do. I wonder what they think when they click on that subscribe link and their browser presents an XML doc tree or an error message. Safari's little blue "RSS" up in the address bar is perfect. I click on that and it sends the appropriate link to my default feed reader.
Until it's that easy everywhere, I think many people will stay confused.