WordPress Subscriptions appear as a tab in the top menu bar when logged in and browsing around WordPress.com blogs and as a tab on a user's WordPress.com homepage. The top menu tab can be used to instantly subscribe to any WordPress.com blog, and when managing your subscriptions, you can also add RSS-enabled blogs from around the web simply by typing the blog or site's URL in a field. New post notifications are available via e-mail and IM, but they aren't sent to new subscribers by default.
Billing the tool as a sort of RSS reader for the digitally challenged among us, WordPress Social Engineer Andy Peatling wrote, "You may use RSS feeds to keep track, but those can be tricky to manage for a non-technical person."
If you're well-versed in the ways of the web, this might sound like a bit of a head-scratcher at first. After all, who in the world would need a subscription feature simpler than RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication? Are tools such as Google Reader and FeedDemon truly too difficult for the average Internet user to understand?
"Yes," said a reader who responded to an informal Twitter poll. She noted that most RSS readers are "too easy to load it up, too hard to wade through when I remember to try. Hate RSS."
WordPress Sucscriptions solve this problem by keeping subscriptions as simple as a Facebook News Feed. See the most recent blog posts first; like or reblog at will. It's a familiar approach, thanks to Facebook's introduction of similar-looking UIs years ago.
Another reader highlighted RSS's PR problem among non-technophiles when he wrote, "I never found a compelling reason for RSS." Without cohesive, unified marketing, branding and positioning, RSS has slipped through the cracks for many whose lives don't revolve (at least in part) around reading and writing blogs. But for WordPress.com users, the new feature is a simple and unified with the rest of the experience as a new button on an already-familiar menu, and WordPress is able to market and promote it as part of their already-popular platform. The company even has a support page just for subscription questions.
Subscriptions are also a great move for WordPress as a business, as the feature's button in the WordPress.com menu bar will keep more users reading more WordPress blogs and help strengthen the community of WordPress blogs.