The news of Osama bin Laden's death was credibly confirmed first on Twitter, before President Barack Obama spoke.

Then a random IT contractor in Pakistan, realizing he had unknowingly tweeted about the raid on bin Laden's compound, became an international celebrity.

Then Twitter announced that the hour in which the president spoke was an hour of unprecedented tweeting, with 12.4 million tweets sent.

And yet there was one odd omission in all this good news for the company: Bin Laden's death did not move the needle on Twitter's record for the most tweets sent simultaneously.

So what holds that record? What great news event could be so important as to put the decade's biggest story in the shadows? Answer: New Year's Eve in Japan, which clocked in at more than 6,000 tweets per second.

It seems a perfect metaphor for everything that's right and wrong with the microblogging service. On the one hand, it has grown up fast and strong, becoming a respected news delivery service in its own right, chattering about bin Laden's death before the TV networks would even speculate that's what the news was.

On the other hand, it can sometimes seem highly regressed, full of messages that read like the products of 6,000 drunken New Year's Eve tweets.

Twitter is just been around five years, after all. And in the aggregate, it seems a lot like a 5-year-old -- prone to tantrums, spinning wild fabrications and repeating the same short sentences over and over. You could be forgiven for feeling uneasy that this anarchic toddler of a service has become part of the fabric of journalism.

That kind of dysfunctional ambivalence is something you find writ large in Twitter's story at the moment. It's a cultural phenomenon, but it doesn't make a profit yet. Founder Jack Dorsey returned to the company at a crucial moment, except he's still focused on his next venture, Square.

And the service he invented spreads both truth and disinformation at equal speed. As Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore famously said, "I learned that Michael Jackson died on Twitter. I also learned that Justin Bieber died on Twitter."