As soon as the news broke Sunday night that President Obama would be addressing the nation, my daughter made a prediction. "He's going to tell us that Osama bin Laden is dead," she said.

If she had immediately tweeted her conclusion, might she have been the person who broke the news about Bin Laden's death? After all, it wasn't out there yet. So, officially, that might have been true. But, with all due respect to my daughter, what credibility would you give to a new college graduate sitting in a hotel room in Illinois who is not privy to the inner workings of the White House?

The beauty of Twitter, of course, is that anyone can say anything, and the rest of the world gets it in real time. But that's also what can sometimes make it a dangerous thing.

There's been a lot of talk in the last couple of days about Bin Laden's death being Twitter's "CNN moment," referring to the cable news network's rise to prominence during the Gulf War two decades ago. It makes some sense; Twitter's rapid growth in both size and influence has made it the preferred place for millions of people (including me) to keep track of what's going on — and to contribute themselves to the conversation. But at the same time, that Twitter is without filter is not a fact that should be ignored.

The smart ones who have analyzed Twitter's role in the Bin Laden story acknowledge that while Twitter may be a news organization in the loosest sense of the term, it is, unlike CNN, not journalism. But journalism can be found there. It's value to me, in large part, is because it is a readily available, convenient distribution channel — like the internet as a whole, or TV, or radio — for the established, credible news organizations upon which I depend. I do not look to it for the kind of "citizen journalism" that many of its adherents claim is its true appeal. There's just too much room for error.

What Twitter's advocates should point to, as new media analyst Brian Solis said in his blog post on the issue, is Twitter's role in making "shared experiences come alive," as well as its valuable role in filling "the space between an event and when media fact check and officially report it." Read the post — he makes some excellent points. (At the same time, it bothers me a bit that Solis says that people on Twitter learned about what was going on in Pakistan "long before" the President did. I hope that was meant as hyperbole, because there are no indications that that was the case.)

It's also clear that Twitter can serve to influence the way news is being reported. Wolf Blitzer squirmed on CNN Sunday night, because while he knew what the President was going to announce, he wouldn't break the news because he was clearly fearful that he could somehow be wrong — and he knows that a mistake on this kind of story can cost you your career. But at the same time, you knew Blitzer was also deathly afraid that someone else would break the news first.

That's exactly what happened — on Twitter. The tweet from Donald Rumsfeld chief of staff Keith Urbahn is being hailed as the official breaking of the story — and something that most likely spurred CNN and others to report what they knew. But what is being lost in the shuffle is the fact that Urbahn quickly followed his first tweet with another that said the news "could be misinformation or pure rumor." Or, as it would have been in my daughter's case, just a wild guess.

So was it good or bad that Twitter may have pushed the national news organizations to report the story sooner than they wanted to? Did it simply allow journalists to throw caution to the wind because now they're reporting on what's being reported, and thus making themselves no longer responsible for what might be erroneous information? Or was it a case where journalists needed to be prodded to be less cautious, to disclose what they knew even if it might burn some bridges?

The answers may be a little difficult to ascertain in this case. The information turned out to be correct, so no one needed to be embarrassed, and no one needed to be blamed. The true test of whether this whole system is working may well be when the big news turns out to be wrong. Will Twitter then get the blame, just as it is now getting the credit?

This post was written by Jeff Moravec and originally published on his blog. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @moraveccomm