Twitter will now include, for a story from a partner:

1. The headline.

2. A brief synopsis.

3. A photo or illustration.

4. A link to the full article.

5. A link to subscribe to the source (not the tweeter).

Here's a screen shot.

I think we see where this is headed.

1. First, it's hard to see this as a tweet, under any reasonable definition of a tweet. It has more than 140 characters. And a lot of other features that are not available to tweets.

2. It's not very convincing to argue that there's a magic to 140 characters while giving much more to some members of the network. Let's hope that Twitter, Inc doesn't have the chutzpah to do that in the future.

3. Why stop at a synopsis, why not include the whole article? This is where the partners have to start worrying. Because the day will come when Twitter comes to them and says "Our users want the full article, not just the synopsis." So either the news org provides the whole article, or they compete with other providers who do.

4. After that, it's only a matter of time before Twitter is putting ads on those pages, or otherwise monetizing. There will be a split, but it will be less attractive to the publisher than if the news resided on their own site.

It would have been easier for the news industry to compete with Twitter if they had made this move themselves a couple of years ago by starting a Twitter-like network, with the all the features Twitter is now introducing (which all were already in the publications' RSS feeds).

The product we all want is the realtime feed of Twitter, the river of news -- and the full text of the stories. A couple of years ago only the news industry could have provided that. Technically, that's still true, but in the intervening time, Twitter has gotten stronger, and more people expect to get their news on Twitter. Wait much longer and that will be an insurmountable advantage.

 6/17/2012; 12:44:35 PM.