Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg Named TIME’s Person of the Year 2010

Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2010.

As the visionary behind the world’s most far-reaching social networking site, Mark Zuckerberg, 26, has not only changed the way the Internet works, but the way it feels.
Mark is the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist who left her profession to work in her husband’s office, Zuckerberg grew up in Dobbs Ferry, New York and famously came up with the idea for Facebook while studying at Harvard.

Time defines the Person of the Year as the person who, for better or for worse, does the most to influence the events of the year.

Time says it chose Zuckerberg “for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives”.

“In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the US,” the Time article, penned by Lev Grossman, said.

“It started out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real, something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale.

“It’s a permanent fact of our global social reality… we have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here.”

Zuckerberg, 26, owns about a quarter of Facebook’s shares and is one of the world’s youngest billionaires.

The runners-up chosen by Time were the conservative US Tea Party movement that made a big impact in recent midterm elections, followed by WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.

Readers of Time magazine had voted overwhelmingly for Assange to be named Person of the Year, followed by Lady Gaga, the US singer best known for her elaborate costumes.

In an interview on NBC television, Time managing editor Richard Stengel said Zuckerberg was “humbled” and “deeply affected” by the award.

Contrary to the unpleasant portrait of Zuckerberg presented in the hit Hollywood movie The Social Network, the Facebook mogul is “very affable,” Stengel said.

Controversial, US-backed Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the group of Chilean miners who survived being buried underground in a tunnel were the final runners-up selected by Time.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke received the honour last year.

The 2008 winner was then-US president-elect Barack Obama, while Vladimir Putin claimed the honour in 2007.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,2037103,00.html#ixzz18SHiPsFG
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/12/16/3094383.htm