It’s that time again when various media channels do a retrospective on the year. It is interesting to note that the conservative Tea Party political movement, Julian Assange- the WikiLeaks guy, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the 33 trapped Chilean miners were passed up for  TIME magazine’s choice as “Person of The Year”.

The bottom line is that Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of the Facebook social networking site has changed the way many people socialize which has had a huge impact on people’s day to day lives.  I mean, in the past you could go years without communicating with an old school chum or distant relative etc. Not anymore. Facebook has changed all that. In a nutshell, Facebook has made the world seem “smaller”. If you are a Facebook user you will easily understand the impact it has made. And since it is closing in on 600 million users then it is more likely than not that you are a “Facebook user”. That’s probably why Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year on Wednesday. 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 previous year. There is no denying that Facebook is a phenomenon that is transforming lives. The crazy part is that Zuckerberg has accomplished this in only a few years.

What is amazing is that “Zuck” (Mark Zuckerberg) began the entire Facebook project when he was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard University in 2004. He created a web service called “thefacebook.com” from his dorm which generated 22,000 hits on the first day it went live. Today, he is one of the world’s youngest billionaires. Not only that, but his privately held company is expected to report 2010 revenues in the $2 billion range. Zuckerberg also demonstrated an altruistic side. He pledged a $100 million donation to the Newark, New Jersey, school system this year, and was also the subject of the hit Hollywood movie “The Social Network.” Mark Zuckerberg at the raw age of 26 is the youngest “Person of The year” winner since Charles Lindbergh earned the magazine’s first person of the year honor in 1927. That year, Lindbergh became the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. This Time Magazine honor has become a household cultural reference in the United States ever since. However, the “Person of the Year” award has had its controversy, for example, hen Adolf Hitler was named Person of the Year in 1938. Last year, in 2009 U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke earned that honor.

A poll from Time Magazine showed readers favored naming WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange this year but Time editor Richard Stengel said the magazine’s editors and correspondents chose Zuckerberg after consulting among themselves, past winners and other world luminaries.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 16th, 2010 at 5:56 pm and is filed under News, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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