When you look back on new products, new technologies and new headlines, you can usually spot that catalyst moment when they catapulted into the spotlight. Well, some analysts are saying that Charlie Sheen’s recent Twitter binge is Twitter’s catalyst moment, just like the SNL Digital Short “Lazy Sunday” was for YouTube.

Wedbush Securities, a financial services and investment company, released a report this week noting the similarities between Sheen and Lazy Sunday, and what they did for their respective technologies.

Among its first pages, the report discusses the importance that Saturday Night Live Digital Short “Lazy Sunday” had for YouTube. It propelled the video sharing service into the mainstream, generating 7 million views alone in 2005. Ten months later, Google announced the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Wedbush connects this catalyst moment to Sheen’s Twitter explosion. Sheen reached 1 million followers in a single day, and has taken Ashton’s cause a step further, propelling Twitter into the mainstream.

The report considers the Sheen phenomenon as an example of how Twitter can enable individuals to build their own audiences without the need for “traditional media gatekeepers”. Twitter gives content creators unfettered freedom, and the monetizing potential, as seen in Sheen’s first sponsored tweet which sold for well over $50,000, is astronomical.

All of this combined with JP Morgan’s interest in owning a piece of Twitter and Twitter’s growing business model lead Wedbush to conclude that Twitter is reaching a watershed moment.

Whether this will mean we’ll be seeing an IPO (which Biz Stone has actively denied) or a more robust business model from Twitter in the near future remains to be seen.

The Wedbush Report can be accessed on Scribd in full.

Wedbush report via NYT’s DealBook