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Does this actually solve the problem? I mean they offer two text prompts "Follow this Blog" which makes me think that it will take me to twitter to follow them
by yasth 14y ago
Does this actually solve the problem?
I mean they offer two text prompts "Follow this Blog" which makes me think that it will take me to twitter to follow them there, and "Subscribe" which makes me think mostly of email lists. I'd suggest something like "Track New Posts" or the like.
Ok let's assume that you can come up with text that actually makes people want to click it. The only help a user gets then is "Pick a service to subscribe to this page:" which could confuse the user into thinking it is some sort of update tracker for the particular page they are on. If a user doesn't recognize any of those services they won't even know what they are picking. There is no glossing, like say "Bloggtroter will let you get updates to this site, and your other favorite sites in email". Oh and they can't click on the sites (to say read about them) without setting a preference that is hidden. On that why have a separate settings page at all? Just have a "View All" button and if they click something else set that.
If you work through all that I'm still not certain the use case is actually better than what they get if they hit the RSS feed directly and styles and transforms are used.
- julien 14y agoThe point is to not make you click the button the SubToMe homepage of course, but on blog posts that you liked, on your friends's home page... etc. The words are then up to them. As for users not recognizing any of the services, this is what we're trying to solve with registration. Once you've used any subscription service once, it will show up in the modal, rather than the defaults. You are right though that we need to clarify what each service does to make it easier for each user to pick their favorite services.
- yasth 14y agoWell yes the words are up to the site owner, but I think you underestimate just how hard it is to explain what RSS does, and why you'd want to do it. Honestly if you can find a way to do that in something short enough to put on a button, then you've pretty much solved the future of RSS.
- julien 14y agoAgreed, it is hard to explain RSS and this is one of the goals of this button: completely hide them away from the subscribers...