TIME Names Mark Zuckerberg Person of Year

theodp writes "Sorry, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates — there's a new geek kid in town. TIME magazine has selected Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as its Person of the Year. Why? '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,' reasoned TIME At age 26, Zuckerberg is TIME's second-youngest selection, bested only by Charles Lindbergh. So what does Zuckerberg do for an encore — Academy Award, maybe?"

Good choice

[commodore64_love]

Facebook is kinda silly but it did enable me to reconnect with old College & high school mates I've not seen in 10-15 years (since graduation). Good invention.

Time cops out again

[NotInfinitumLabs]

They've had a history of choosing a non-controversial candidate over the obvious winner since choosing the Ayatollah back in 1979 caused them to lose subscriptions. Remember when they picked Giulianni over Bin Laden?

Re:Julian Assange

[Weezul]

I'd rock if he won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Peace Prize though, obviously those send a far more important message, they are just not as quite as timely. lol

In any case, wikileaks will "expose an ecosystem of corruption" in a "major U.S. bank" early next year, while presumably continuing to work their way through the U.S. embassy cables. So I'd imagine he'll get another shot. :)

Amnesty International declare him a prisoner of conscience [wikipedia.org] once more details emerge about the rape accusations.

Re:Julian Assange

[Fractal Dice]

I see Wikileaks and Facebook as the two ends of this generation's tug of war over where power rests in the next phase of the information age. Wikileaks is taking the data of large organizations and putting it in the hands of the public. Facebook is taking the data of details of the public's lives and putting it into the hands of private organizations.

Applaud

[NuKe_MoNgOoSe]

That this man managed to come up with a idea which has set him and any future children he may have for life, I hate the fucker however for bringing about yet another medium which proves how simple people really are between FB and Twitter I know when any of my friends is having a hygeine issue, when they are going to the mall, when their sig other cheats on them, whenever they are having a bad day! Never have I felt closer or more wanting a gun in my entire life. I hate people and you can say this and argue that but it wont sway my opinion that humanity as a whole is a stunted child sitting in a corner chewing on crayons.

Re:Julian Assange

[Sir_Sri]

I'm not sure that's fair. Assange is important, but he just founded wikileaks, he didn't populate it with content. The editor in chief, the founder etc. of the new york times don't really deserve enormous personal accolades for the pentagon papers. Wikileaks is valuable because it facilitates what journalists should be doing, but the vast majority of what it releases is of no value (by volume), but I'm not sure it's quite fair to make him person of the year. PFC manning, assuming he actually leaked the material maybe. But Julian Assange and Mark Zuckerberg both don't deserve the accolade for the same reason, they just made a website that other people can upload stuff to. 3 or 4 years from now, someone else could come along with a better way to upload stuff and either of them could be forgotten in a heartbeat.

Since time does award person of the year to more than just one person, I think a better answer might have been to give it to Wikileaks supporters (use editorial staff to come up with a better name) rather than just Assange, or to Wikileaks as a whole. For showing us that most of what happens in diplomatic meetings is mind numbingly boring and best left unrepeated, but the bad stuff can be very very bad.

Re:orly?

[Deep Esophagus]

I'm still puzzling over the "creating a new system of information" part. I realize that from a marketing perspective, Facebook is ten bajillion times more successful than Friendster, Myspace, etc. but Zuckerberg didn't *create* social networking any more than Al Gore *created* the internet.

Re:Zuckerberg over Assange?

[pjfontillas]

Assange had the majority vote. TIMES reserved the right to choose the winner regardless of the poll outcome.