Monday, September 26, 2005

Browse. Search. Subscribe.

In one of my meetings last Thursday at Yahoo we talked about the icon that Yahoo uses to add items to your subscription list on My Yahoo. This subject came up because of something Yahoo is doing that is very cool, they're supporting OPML export of the user's subscription list. Now, this is a feature that Radio UserLand had in 2002, and that's basically why all aggregators are expected to provide export of subscription lists in OPML. It's a good thing for users because it means you can switch. If you find an aggregator you like better than My.Yahoo, they say go ahead and leave us. They believe you'll stay because they have the best features, performance and price, not because you have to stay. That's the sign of a company that really cares about the people who use their services.

If this is to work, every vendor has to acknowledge that they're not the first or last aggregator, and that it's reasonable to assume that a user might want to use more than one aggregator. They might have one at the office and one at home, or one on a desktop or one on a laptop or a PDA or cell phone. And at some point we're probably going to want to integrate podcasting clients and news readers, and pretty soon other media types.

So, anyway, swirling around all these issues is the user interface question. I called Yahoo's icon a problem, not just because it was appearing on Yahoo's sites, but also because it was appearing on other sites. I worked real hard to get the NY Times on the RSS bandwagon, for example, only to have them mark up their page with dozens of "Add this to My Yahoo" icons. Wow. What an eyesore. And I told them I felt that way, and last week they said they'd like to fix it and wanted to know what I thought they should do. I said -- give me some time to think about it, and now I've had enough time, and I have a recommendation, and if I do say so myself, I think it's pretty darned clever.

First the answer. The button should be white on orange and it should say, boldly, SUBSCRIBE.

Why? Well consider the T-shirt from Microsoft t-shirt that their people were all wearing at Gnomedex. On the front-side it said Longhorn Hearts RSS. And on the back it offered a mantra that would be repeated many times by Microsoft people.

Browse. Search. Subscribe.

Browse. Search. Subscribe.

Browse. Search. Subscribe.

Browse. Search. Subscribe.

Over and over. First came browsing, then came searching, and now you have Subscribe. You know what? They're right. And even better, they've told us what they're going to say. And if we say that too, then we agree. It's the old second-mover thing, the second one has the power to make a standard. So let's make a standard. That white on orange SUBSCRIBE button should do what it says it does. When you click on it you should subscribe to whatever it is you're looking at.

Now there's a small matter of how to do it that remains to be determined, but I think this is a good place to pause and think some more.