Facebook's Zuckerberg is 'Person of the Year'

Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time magazine's Person of the Year, it was revealed on the 'Today' show Wednesday.

Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel, who made the announcement, said Zuckerberg was chosen because he accomplished something that had never been done before: “Connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them.”

“The social networking platform he invented ... is the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet,” Stengel said. “Facebook is now the third-largest country on earth, and probably holds more information than any government about its citizens. Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, is its T-shirt-wearing head-of-state.”

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.

Zuckerberg, born on May 14, 1984, is an American computer scientist, software developer, philanthropist and creator of the social networking site Facebook. It was formed into a private company with classmate co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes, while students at Harvard University.

The founding of the site was this year the subject of "The Social Network", a hard-hitting film that portrayed Zuckerberg as a power-hungry, back-stabbing hacker motivated by social acceptance and girls.

The decision to name Zuckerberg followed weeks of debate and discussion both internally at the magazine and on blog forums online. Among the other's considered were the Tea Party, a loose affiliation of American citizens united by their dislike of big government; Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks organization has shared reams of sensitive diplomatic cables with the world; Hamid Karzai, the elected leader of Afghanistan; the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped half a mile underground for more than two months; and Steve Jobs, the Apple Inc. co-founder and chief executive who in 2010 launched the iPad, which quickly became the gadget of the year.

But Zuckerberg won out because nearly 1 out of every 10 people on the planet uses Facebook, and the site handles 1.7 billion interactions a minute. Almost 1 million new people sign up for Facebook every single day.

Stengel said Zuckerberg is “creating a new system of exchanging information that has become both indispensable and sometimes a little frightening” — and it’s changing our lives “in ways that are innovative and even optimistic.”

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