Twitter's Mess a Thing of Beauty

(MoneyWatch)  If nothing else, Twitter has caught the attention of the people who are focused on how businesses have to transform themselves to remain relevant in the 21st century. There's nothing quite like the bankruptcy of General Motors, after all, to drive home the point of "innovate, or die."

Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, published a piece this morning on Harvard Business.org, arguing that "Twitter is one of the world's most radical management innovators." Here are a handful of takeaways, embellished and interpreted by yours truly:

• "The business of business [now] is to add value" -- not to extract value. That old model, extraction, is going the way of the Oldsmobile.
• With its open platform, commitment to the value of ephemera, and free access for all, Twitter provides an exceedingly democratic environment for the exchange of real-time information.
• "Today, Twitter is the master of viral economies." Information now moves at the speed of a Tweet in the format of 140 characters or less.
• The simplicity of Twitter is masterful. It is utterly devoid of complexity, and that adds solid business value.
• "Twitter realizes neighborhood effects, not just network effects: complex sets of intersecting, overlapping, mutually reinforcing network effects."
• "Twitter is messy -- people can use it in uncontrolled ways -- and that messiness means Twitter has better ideas faster than, for example, Facebook."

This last point is my favorite. When my kids were still infants, I remember reading those parenting books, you know, and one piece of advice that stuck with me was how to handle a baby who repeatedly uses whatever material is at hand (including food) to create great big messes from her high chair.

"Let them be -- this is their inherent creativity at work."

The same can be said of the mess being created over at Twitter. It's a thing of beauty.

(Thanks to Thierry Lamouline for alerting me to Haque's post, which is titled " Twitter's Ten Rules for Radical Innovators.")