ABC 7 News was the first station on TV with the hostage standoff. But Twitter beat everyone.

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The first tweets hit just a few minutes after James J. Lee entered the building.

One tweet at 1:13 p.m. may have been the first indication that something was wrong at One Discovery Place.

"A bunch of cops w guns and machine guns drawn surrounding #discovery corporate building" @wasroykosuge wrote.

American University senior Alex Priest couldn't get enough of the story. He uses Twitter as his chief source of news gathering and sharing. He's got more than 3,300 followers and he kept them constantly informed.

"One of my friends actually said something about how Twitter almost seemed like it was under hostage just by the topic," Priest said.

Priest tweeted 79 times Wednesday under the #discovery hashtag. He had plenty of company.

Twitter usage about the story peaked at around 16,000 people in the 3 p.m. hour. It's Mandy Jenkins' job to sift through all that cyber information. She's the social media producer for TBD.com.

"It made it so that everyone was a reporter," Jenkins said. "To some extent, you know, there were people reporting at the scene, people who are nearby, people who know people. They were all acting as reporters."

But since not everyone's a journalist, credibility is a concern.

"Someone Tweeted a photo and said, 'My friend from inside the building took this picture of the gunman' and it was everywhere," Jenkins recalled. It was wrong. Priest say so-called 'crowd-sourcing' quickly corrected the mistake.

"As people start realizing, for example, that the photo is fake, it immediately shuts down," Priest said. "People immediately stop talking about it and start spreading the word that it's not the actual suspect."

Jenkins believes this was the most thoroughly covered story on Twitter in its four-year existence. Though this TwitPic sent out after the plane landed in the Hudson River last year was probably the earliest highlight for the social media medium.

Jenkins adds there was a strong synergy between the mainstream media and Twitter-users. She expects more and more traditional journalists to begin relying on the micro-blogging service.