We're having some interesting internal debates here at Yahoo! about RSS adoption.  There's at least some agreement that mainstreaming RSS subscriptions is about simplifying the signup user interface.  The research shows that "XML" doesn't have tangible value to people, even amongst those who know what it means.  If the orange XML button were on NASDAQ, you could make a quick buck shorting it, I'm sure.

We also know that verbs make much better calls to action than nouns.  So, what is the right verb for RSS feeds?  Is it "Subscribe"?  How about "Add"?  Or "Track"?

Tom Raftery thinks 'Subscribe' with a little tooltip next to it is the right way to present the experience.  Pete Freitag came up with a nice UI in his SoloSub experiment, but it's definitely missing a clear call-to-action for non-initiated users. 

Of course, Dave Winer, Jeremy Zawodny, Dare Obasanjo, Tim Bray and several others, have had debates about what the behavior of that button should be.  Regardless of the browser behavior, we still have a verb problem.

Yahoo! currently uses "Add Content" on My Yahoo!.  And that seems to have paid off pretty well, but it was designed for a dashboard interface.  In any other enviornment,  "Subscribe" is probably a better action word. 

However any research will tell you that people find the word "Subscribe" to be a loaded concept...it might have pay implications...it might mean that I have to do something to get something...it might mean I need to cancel something...it feels permanent.

Perhaps more importantly, the word "Subscribe" may be a conflicting term when you also have paid services that people subscribe to or email newsletters promoted on the same page.  

So, then you start thinking "Add Feeds" might make more sense, in general.  But where you are "Adding" these things becomes crucial to that experience.  And "Add" is being used in many different contexts for other content types.  It may work as the right action in a very specific context, but it can't be applied the moment you abstract the UI out of the local environment.  

If I'm on a news site somewhere, and I see a button to "Add Feeds" I have no idea where they are going and if I'll ever see them again after I "Add" them.  Does "Adding" a feed do the same thing as "Adding an Event" to my calendar?  Is it like "Adding" a friend in my social network?  Am I "Adding" two things together to make one thing?  There's no concept that I can have an ongoing relationship with the content of the feed with the word "Add".  And the word will get even less meaningful over time as there are more things people can add to more environments.

I would like to push for "Subscribe" and "Subscriptions", as it's a more scaleable nomenclature and more accurate for the experience.  But I have trouble arguing that mainstream users are ready to "Subscribe" to things as readily as they will "Add" things.  

If we're ever going to solve the chiclet overload problem, we need to come up with something that the 95% of the Internet audience who doesn't yet grasp RSS can relate to without having to be trained.

Of course, there’s a lot to do in terms of improving the ways people consume RSS, too.  But that’s a different debate.