By now, the world knows about Osama bin Laden’s passing at the hands of the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six — but late on Sunday, first word came not from mainstream media, but from Twitter. I can attest to its pedigree as a breaking news source. When I saw a bulletin on The New York Times homepage that President Obama was about to speak on an urgent matter, I rushed, like many folks, to the micro-blogging service Twitter. Tweets about bin Laden set a record, running at an average rate of 3,440-per-second and peaking at 5,106 per second.

Sure enough, despite some initial musings that the action might have been something related to Moammar Gadhafi, the consensus quickly formed around the fact that the international terrorist bin Laden was dead — soon tweets were coming in from Reuters, the Financial Times, and The New York Times confirming that as the topic of Obama’s late night press conference. Very quickly, Twitter friends and acquaintances were chiming in as well — live, and faster than websites and the TV channels could keep up. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the variety of potential topics President Obama might’ve been planning to speak about, there seemed to be little in the way of conspiracy theory, and few jokes in poor taste. Many have deemed this to be a Twitter turning point, much like CNN’s coverage distinguished it on 9/11.

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