Mark Zuckerberg is The 2010 Time Person of the Year

Bill Beatty
Bill Beatty
December 15, 2010
4 Comments

Time Magazine Mark ZuckerbergTIME Magazine bucked a late push for the incarcerated man behind Wikileaks, Julian Assange and today and named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as the TIME Magazine Person of the Year for 2010.

On their website TIME gives their reasons for naming Zuckerberg as their Person of the Year, “Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but 70% of Facebook users live outside the U.S. 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.”

It’s hard to argue the effect Facebook has had on the information age. The website has recently topped 550 million users and it accounts for one of out of four American page views.

Facebook allows individuals to voluntary share information about themselves but critics content that Facebook.com actively tricks users into sharing their information. It’s a debate that will rage on for the next year and beyond.

Before the announcement, bookmakers had Zuckerberg as a 5/1 favorite to win the award behind the Chilean Miners at 4/1 but TIME bases their award on who has had the greatest effect on society now and will continue to have an effect in the future.

The Miners were a nice story but they haven’t changed the world.

In TIME’s reader poll, Zuckerberg finished tenth.
1. Julian Assange
2. Recep Tayyip Erdogan
3. Lady Gaga
4. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
5. Glenn Beck
6. Barack Obama
7. Steve Jobs
8. The Chilean Miners
9. The Unemployed American
10. Mark Zuckerberg

The man at the top of the list, Julian Assange, had a groundswell of internet support after his divisive website Wikileaks released thousands of Diplomatic Cables and other classified US Government documents.

Depending on your opinion of Assange, he’s either a hero to the common people or a scourge on society. The odds makers had Assange’s odds of winning the award at 16/1.

Zuckerberg is an excellent choice for TIME person of the year but if Wikileaks continues to cause havoc for governments around the world, Assange and his practice sharing classified information could make him the frontrunner for 2011.

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Tags: Article, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Person of the Year, Time Magazine
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