Mark Zuckerberg chosen as Time’s Person of the Year

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been selected as Time magazine’s Person of the Year. This accolade is indicative of the increasing popularity of the CEO of Facebook in a year which seen a biopic  that is based on his life thus far.

Explaining the reason behind the choice, the Time team has stated that,

“ 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, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is Time’s 2010 Person of the Year,”

The other contenders for this prestigious title include WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, the Tea Party, Afganistan’s president Hamid Karzai and the Chilean miners.

Speaking about the significance of the tribute, Zuckerberg has stated that,

“Being named as Time Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I’m happy to be a part of that.”

Time has published a detailed overview of his story and the early stages of Facebook. In this special issue, the magazine has claimed that,

“Zuckerberg is part of the last generation of human beings who will remember life before the Internet, though only just. He started Facebook as a way for people on college campuses to communicate with and keep track of one another — and occasionally poke each other and leer at each other’s pictures — but in a broader sense he was firing the first shot in his generation’s takeover of the Internet. He’s just getting started. What looks like a meteoric rise to the rest of us, he sees as an opening act. Because now that Facebook has scaled up to a species-level event, the real work can start: taking a 550 million–person network out on the highway and seeing what it can do.”