Microsoft Research has an article discussing efforts by their researchers to understand blogs vs. twitter. At first I wasn’t going to blog this article, but it brings up interesting points to consider in data centers of the big vs. small. Which is a good question to ask in data centers. Is it best to be big or small in data centers?

Researchers Ride the Twitter Wave

By Rob Knies

August 6, 2009 2:00 PM PT

He rocks in the treetops all the day long,

Hoppin’ and a-boppin’ and a-singin’ his song.

All the little birds on Jaybird Street

Love to hear the robin go tweet tweet tweet …

* * *

When L.A. R&B singer Bobby Day took Jimmie Thomas’ lyrics to the top of the charts in the summer of 1958—a tune memorably revived in 1972 by a 13-year-old Michael Jackson—there was no way to foresee how those words would resonate a half-century later.

But they certainly do. Twitter, the wildly popular micro-blogging service, has become an Internet sensation, with millions flocking to the site each month to post a jittery stream of brief status updates. Whether it’s Ashton Kutcher or your cousin Sue, these days, it seems, everybody wants to emulate Rockin’ Robin.

There will be few people arguing for small data centers as the whole supply chain system is set up to maximize profits by building bigger more complex data centers. What is the right size for data centers? The problem is the data center construction teams think from their construction and provisioning view. The whole social network effect of what happens with something like Twitter is beyond the data center construction team.

“Blogging has long been studied as a medium of information diffusion, and micro-blogging has started to be used for marketing. Analyzing the differences and similarities in terms of information-diffusion structure and efficiency can yield valuable knowledge to the proper use of each.”

Aren’t data centers built for information diffusion?

What types of data centers are ideal for information diffusion? Bet you Facebook and Twitter can look at their data center as social networks instead of buildings.