Osama bin Laden's death could have been just another Twitter rumour but before it was officially confirmed, the social media site was telling us what US President Barack Obama was going to say before he said it.
For at least an hour in the lead-up to his televised address, there were Tweeters guessing and joking about the reason why Barack Obama had called a late night press conference. The arrival of the iPhone5 or aliens were just some of the more ridiculous ones to emerge from the Twitterverse.
But the first serious tweet came from Keith Urbahn, a staffer for former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. He tweeted at 12.24pm Australian time that he had a reputable source telling him US forces had killed Osama Bin Laden.
Then strangely WWF wrestler the Rock alluded to Osama's death in this tweet and CNN's Steve Brusk tweeted that Obama would be talking about a national security matter.
And then CBS Capitol Hill reporter, Jill Jackson confirmed it at 12.32pm, tweeting "House Intelligence committee aide confirms that Osama Bin Laden is dead. US has the body."
This first tweet may have only come a hair's whisker before the TV networks, but in news, who's first matters.
For those looking, you could have even seen signs of Bin Laden's death in the Twitterverse much earlier. About nine hours earlier in fact when @ReallyVirtual or Sohaib Athar tweetedfrom Abbottabad, the village where bin Laden was killed, that he had heard gunfire and helicopters.
"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)." Later he tweeted that he was just "a tweeter, awake at the time . . ." and there weren't "many twitter users in Abbottabad."
But after the tweets from Jackson and Urbahn, the number of Osama-related tweets mushroomed, and again when CNN was running it as a confirmed story on their network. So before Obama told the world, many avid Twitter fans had already known for at least an hour.
Before Obama's address one in five tweets in the world were about Bin Laden's death. Indeed Twitter itself said that the story had prompted the highest sustained rate of tweets ever, 3000 per second.
An internet poll last night of 11,500 people, had nearly 36 per cent say they found out about Bin Laden's death first through Twitter, and about 14 per cent said they found out first through television news. Even Facebook beat the TV networks, with about 19 per cent finding out that way. Bear in mind this was a poll of social media users.
Even so Twitter's role in delivering what is one of the biggest news stories in recent years must be the tipping point for the microblogging site; that Twitter will finally be taken seriously as a news source.
But this could easily have been just another rumour, it's happened before. We saw this most recently when Twitter told us that a Qantas A380 had crashed in Indonesia, parts of the story were true (for example debris falling into the jungle) but the rest of the story was obscured by online hysteria.
Twitter is perfectly designed to be the best generator of Chinese whispers; lots of people, not much detail and and a speed unrivalled by any other media. It also has the ability to bemuse as happened yesterday when there was persistent confusion among twitterers between the hash tag #osamadead and #obamadead.
But what makes it a dubious news source is also what makes it the best news source - when it gets it right. It delivers faster than anything else can because it's like the chaos theory of news generation. And it delivers it with wit, humour and original voices.
Despite the gravitas of yesterday's situation, Twitter's irreverent humour was at its best. For example, one of the top tweets of the day was "R.I.P Osama Bin Laden - World Hide And Go Seek Champion (2001 - 2011)". A few tweeted along these lines: "Osama dead: Donald Trump demands the death certificate." And yet another had this punchline on the day: "Osama probably regrets signing up for the Playstation network I'm guessing."
US comedian and writer Dana Gould made the followingobservation: "Bin Laden officially dead, the same week we learned Obama officially born. Weird . . . :
As much as Twitter showed what it was capable of yesterday, it's important to know that while many punters heard it first through social media, that was merely the first step. To know more than the basics or the humour of the day, one had to look further.
But to have news break on a medium and see how a whole group of people react to a single event all on one day in the same medium was something to behold. What it is capable of doing in the future could be even more remarkable.
Bella Counihan writes for the National Times.
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