If you've ever tried to validate Twitter's existence to a bunch of haters who keep insisting that Twitter is full of useless people tweeting about how they're making a sandwich, you now officially have something to shove in their faces. For those of you who don't follow the news, here's a quick recap:

Iran had presidential elections last week. Voter turnout was disproportionately high and final tallies were delivered absurdly quickly, leading many in Iran and abroad to suspect that the election, which went strongly in favor of incumbent Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was rigged. In the days leading up to and immediately after the election, many modes of communication were suspended in Iran, including text messaging, many popular social networking websites and email services, leaving Twitter as one of the only remaining methods of communication.

What followed was the event that may turn out to be the "breaking point" for Twitter, the point where people wake up and realize that it's not about sandwiches. Protesters in Iran supporting the opposition party began to organize via Twitter. Protesters on the ground began to use Twitter to post updates about police reaction to the protests, violence against protesters, and to aggregate content like photos and videos of the protests beyond Iran's borders. When CNN failed to give the Iranian election the attention it deserved, Twitter users bashed the network with the #CNNFail hashtag, which trended on Twitter for an entire day. CNN subsequently revised its coverage, making the Iranian political situation one of its most prominent stories (while failing completely to acknowledge that they'd failed to do so in the first place).

Most importantly, Twitter users around the world became intimately aware of a complex political situation about an incredibly important place, from the perspective of the people within Iran's borders. When the opposition party started to use green, the traditional color of Iran, to represent their cause, Twitter users stepped up, hundreds tinting their avatar pictures with green to indicate their support. When Twitter users realized that ReTweets containing the ID of the original poster were circulated, it would make it easier for the Iranian government to track them, a clarion call went out to help minimize the impact on those users by not naming them in Retweets.

In short, people mobilized, and they organized, over a very short period of time, and in spite of a lack of authoritative information on the topic in major news outlets. That's the power of Twitter. Twitter is not just about making sandwiches, it's about free-flowing ideas and communication in an age when an hour can feel like a year.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make a sandwich.