A part of the adoption of RSS/Feeds inside EY involved discussions about what effect this would have on peoples browsing habits and what are the possible knock on effects. Would a desktop reader create, for example, capacity issues on our firewall or internal web servers?
The end result is that it's almost impossible to predict. However, the question came up again recently and, as we now have several feeds, I did a quick check. The xml file of the main feed on our Intranet site was 7k. The home page was 341k.
The most basic computation based on 7k returned every time the reader refreshes the feed on an hourly schedule shows that about 5 days worth of feed updates is equivalent to one visit to the home page.
The feed is only updated two or three times a day. When the xml file hasn't changed the web server returns a 304 (Not Modified) http status code - a tiny fraction of the 7k. Therefore the real value equates to 19 days or 26 if you add weekends in for free.
It's got to look like feeds will reduce traffic.
The counter argument to this is that people will be more aware of updates and therefore it will drive up visits to sites. This may be true, but I have no way to measure it. If it is then, assuming the content is work related, this can only be a Good Thing. It is, after all, one of the fundamental benefits of the technology.
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