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Facebook Programming Social Networks The Internet

TIME Names Mark Zuckerberg Person of Year 317

Posted by CmdrTaco from the remember-when-it-was-you dept.
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?"
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TIME Names Mark Zuckerberg Person of Year More

TIME Names Mark Zuckerberg Person of Year

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  • orly? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:19AM (#34560900)

    more like douche-bag of the year.

    • Re:orly? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Pojut ( 1027544 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:27AM (#34561022) Homepage

      Just this year?

    • For Better or *for Worse* ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohnNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:27AM (#34561034) Journal

      more like douche-bag of the year.

      Just to underscore the "for worse" part of what the Time person is defined as: "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

      Examples:

      1938 Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler
      1939 Soviet Union Joseph Stalin
      1979 Iran Ayatollah Khomeini
      2010 United States Mark Zuckerberg

      • Re:For Better or *for Worse* ... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:52AM (#34561378) Journal
        Stalin was Man of the Year (it didn't become Person of the Year until 1999) twice - once in 1939 and then again in 1942. George W. Bush was person of the year in 2000 - read into that what you will (Obama was in 2008). It's interesting that, over the last 15 years, only two have not been US citizens: Vladimir Putin and 'you'. Before 1995, the country of origin was rarely the same two years in a row. I'm not sure if this means that Time is becoming more parochial, or that they honestly believe that no one outside the USA is that influential anymore.
      • Yeah, because whatever he has done with Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is definitely on the same level as Hitler, Stalin and Khomeini... Sometimes I think peoples perspectives are screwed here on Slashdot, and its posts like yours that affirm that thought.

        • Re:For Better or *for Worse* ... (Score:4, Funny)

          by paiute ( 550198 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @11:32AM (#34562034)

          Yeah, because whatever he has done with Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is definitely on the same level as Hitler, Stalin and Khomeini... Sometimes I think peoples perspectives are screwed here on Slashdot, and its posts like yours that affirm that thought.

          Q. You are in a room with Hitler and Zuckerberg. You have a gun with two bullets. What do you do?

          A. Shoot Zuckerberg twice.

        • That sound you heard is the OP's point whooshing over your head... He's not comparing Zuckerberg to Hitler, he's correcting the common misconception that Time's "Man/Person of the Year" is awarded only for positive reasons - when in fact it's awarded for being most influential for weal or for woe.

      • Just to underscore the "for worse" part of what the Time person is defined as: "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year." Examples:
        1938 Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler
        1939 Soviet Union Joseph Stalin ...

        To elaborate on "for the worse", a recent article by Tim Berners Lee (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=long-live-the-web) is quite relevant here to appreciate the impact of sites like Facebook:

        Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.

        The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI. Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in.

      • I guess it's fair to give him POTY then. He has greatly influenced the world, for the worse. He's commercialized human relationships and the loss of privacy, destroying both in the process.

      • Just to underscore the "for worse" part of what the Time person is defined as: "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year."

        Which only further discredits this selection. I cannot think of a single important event that happened in 2010 that would not have happened without facebook.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hkz ( 1266066 )

        I distinctly remember that they weasled out of making Osama bin Laden their Man of the Year 2001, even though he marked that year like no other.

      • Let's just hop 2011 isn't Mike Godwin for any reason.

        People will then make the Hitler reference, and reality as we know will collapse into a singularity of self reference.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Nikker ( 749551 )
      Hey man he did use wget in his movie that's 1337 enough for me!

    • Re:orly? (Score:4, Funny)

      by anshulajain ( 1359933 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:30AM (#34561084)

      more like douche-bag of the year.

      http://www.dickipedia.org/dick.php?title=Mark_Zuckerberg [dickipedia.org]. Hilarious

    • Re:orly? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Deep Esophagus ( 686515 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @11:30AM (#34561992)
      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.

  • Thoughts on the article... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ideonexus ( 1257332 ) * on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:20AM (#34560906) Homepage Journal
    This article had its ups and downs, mostly downs. From the article:

    "There are other people who can write code as well as Zuckerberg — not many, but some —"

    If the Time profile of Zuckerberg is acurate, then I think even he would be offended by this statement.

    "Websites entreat you to log onto them using your Facebook ID — the New York Times does, and so do Myspace and YouTube."

    Hmmm... So does Time. Great job on the full disclosure principle there.

    "Right now the Internet is like an empty wasteland: you wander from page to page, and no one is there but you."

    Right, because all World Wide Web content is produced by robots.

    Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world, a serendipitous world. You'll be working and living inside a network of people, and you'll never have to be alone again. The Internet, and the whole world, will feel more like a family, or a college dorm, or an office where your co-workers are also your best friends.

    It'll be a wonderful land of lollypops and puppies and kittens! Privacy concerns? No worries:

    "If "liking" an ad the same way you "like" a news article or a photo of your spouse seems creepy to you — it's more or less the definition of what Marx called commodity fetishism — you don't have to do it."

    If you have privacy concerns, then GO BACK TO YOUR COLD LONELY INTERNET COMMIE!!!

    "Zuckerberg has a talent for understanding how people work, but one urge, the urge to conceal, seems to be foreign to him. Sometimes Facebook makes it harder than it should be. It is biased in favor of sharing. That is, after all, what Facebook is for."

    Facebook isn't leaking your personal information to make money, they're doing it because they genuinely misunderstand why people need to keep some things private. Why do you have a problem with this? What's wrong with you? Do you have some secret perverse sexual fetish? Are you performing criminal activities? When did you stop beating your wife?

    I did like this thoughtful paragraph:

    But what makes life complicated in the postmodern technocratic aquarium we're collectively building is that there actually are good reasons to want to hide things. Just because you present a different face to your co-workers and your family doesn't mean you're leading a double life. That's just normal social functioning, psychology as usual. Identity isn't a simple thing; it's complex and dynamic and fluid. It needs to flex a little, the way a skyscraper does in a high wind, and your Facebook profile isn't built to flex.

    But then it goes to the other extreme of The Social Network's Gonna make you demented:

    An article published earlier this year in European Psychiatry presented the case of a woman who lost her job to a Facebook addiction, and the authors suggested that it could become an actual diagnosable ailment... Facebook is supposed to build empathy, but since 2000, Americans have scored higher and higher on psychological tests designed to detect narcissism, and psychologists have suggested a link to social networking.

    I do totally dig this quote, which applies to other online services as well:

    Now Facebook is the bottle, and we're the genie. How small are we willing to make ourselves to fit inside?

    The article was all over the place, but it does give me a more favorable opinion of Zuckerberg, a less favorable opinion of Facebook and Time, lots of concerns about adapting myself to the social network instead of it adapting to me, and now, if you'll excuse me, I must go break this comment down into 50+ tweets.

    • >>>"Right now the Internet is like an empty wasteland: you wander from page to page, and no one is there but you."

      Guess they never heard of Usenet (since 1982) which allowed me connect with the producers of Babylon 5 and Earth Final Conflict, and the whole world when modem speeds were still just 1. Or chatrooms (just as old) or online gaming (1980's tradewars) or web-based discussion forums that are filled with lots of people.

      • No, probably because there were never 500 million people on Tradewars 2002 (a game i spent many hours playing, I might add.) Just because you and your friends were on there doesn't mean that a significant portion of the computer-owning world was... And with Facebook that has changed. Like it or not, it stretches farther and wider than Usenet, IRC, text MMOs, and just about every communication medium that came before it (the exception perhaps being email) ever could.

        • Re:Thoughts on the article... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:59AM (#34561470)

          Like it or not, it stretches farther and wider than Usenet, IRC, text MMOs, and just about every communication medium that came before it (the exception perhaps being email) ever could.

          Funny, there is one medium that has always been more popular than Facebook...if I remember correctly, it is called "The Internet," and it was around years before Facebook ever debuted. I seem to remember that network connecting billions of people around the world, and Facebook simply being one of the ways in which people use the Internet to connect to each other.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by jeffmeden ( 135043 )

            Funny, there is one medium that has always been more popular than Facebook...if I remember correctly, it is called "The Internet," and it was around years before Facebook ever debuted. I seem to remember that network connecting billions of people around the world, and Facebook simply being one of the ways in which people use the Internet to connect to each other.

            Double funny. I sure did enjoy the days of yesteryear when, while browsing altavista.com, I was able to communicate directly with billions of other people...

            Oh wait, that's not how it worked. The WWW was a conversation between you and the server. You sure have to stretch things a long way to insist that by virtue of viewing the same piece of HTML that you were somehow "connected" to everyone else who was looking at it too. That's like saying a library is a great way to meet people. Yes, there you will

            • I have fond memories of communicating by email, IM/IRC, etc. It is as if by virtue of being connected to the Internet, you can send an email message to any email address, and it will be received by someone else who is connected to the Internet. Or perhaps you can use a chat system to engage in real time conversations with any other Internet connected user. Or you might even use Facebook.

              Like I said, the invention that really connected billions of the people is the Internet; Facebook is just a way of u

            • Funny, there is one medium that has always been more popular than Facebook...if I remember correctly, it is called "The Internet," and it was around years before Facebook ever debuted. I seem to remember that network connecting billions of people around the world, and Facebook simply being one of the ways in which people use the Internet to connect to each other.

              Double funny. I sure did enjoy the days of yesteryear when, while browsing altavista.com, I was able to communicate directly with billions of other people...

              Oh wait, that's not how it worked. The WWW was a conversation between you and the server. You sure have to stretch things a long way to insist that by virtue of viewing the same piece of HTML that you were somehow "connected" to everyone else who was looking at it too. That's like saying a library is a great way to meet people. Yes, there you will meet lots of people, who wish you would shut up so they could get back to reading. Notice a difference between that model, and Facebook? People are now empowered at a scale *never before seen* to communicate directly with each other.

              Young one, "The Internet" is more than WWW. I remember communicating with people via computer networks prior to 1994 (and after, without using Mosiac or Netscape).
              Oh, and Facebook? It's just a website. All it is is your browser interacting with a server. No one is communicating directly with each other via Facebook. They're all communicating with Facebook and Facebook is relaying the messages (when it feels like it).

    • It is a little annoying that anyone successful is portrayed as being an all round genius. He had the right combination of tech savvy, business acument and being in the right place at the right time-ness (you might call this "luck", but luck is an underrated skill) to have come up with a killer app.

      Other people came up with more or less the same idea at about the same time and might have been successful were it not for various minor factors that made facebook succeed when others failed.

      • He built a better mousetrap. There were tons of others with the same savvy doing the same thing (friendster, myspace, etc) but in the end he won out, BIG time. Yes, you could say he won the lottery... But you had to be an extremely smart, determined individual to even be bestowed a lottery ticket in the first place.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by paiute ( 550198 )

          He built a better mousetrap. There were tons of others with the same savvy doing the same thing (friendster, myspace, etc) but in the end he won out, BIG time. Yes, you could say he won the lottery... But you had to be an extremely smart, determined individual to even be bestowed a lottery ticket in the first place.

          There is an analogy for this in the financial world: Give a hundred people each a coin and have them flip it. One of these people will flip heads ten times in a row. This person will go on to make a million by writing books and giving seminars about how to successfully flip coins.

      • But none of them were ruthless enough to stab their peers in the back and steal their work. I mean, allegedly.

    • "Right now the Internet is like an empty wasteland: you wander from page to page, and no one is there but you."

      Right, because all World Wide Web content is produced by robots.

      A more fitting description would be to say it’s like a city populated by ghosts. Usually, it’s not falling apart, it’s well-kept, and everything works perfectly. But whoever is doing stuff behind the scenes rarely does anything while you’re watching... it almost always happens behind your back.

    • Time probably agreed to dispel the movie in exchange for zuckerberg-interview and details.

  • Julian Assange (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Weezul ( 52464 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:20AM (#34560912)

    It obviously should have been Julian Assange, duh.

    • Re:Julian Assange (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Conspiracy_Of_Doves ( 236787 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:23AM (#34560964)

      Any possibility that it was "suggested" to Time that Assange not be selected?

      • Re:Julian Assange (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Weezul ( 52464 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:33AM (#34561144)

        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: (Score:2)

          by Yvanhoe ( 564877 )
          For information, Assange has been at least nominated for Nobel Prize (a step that is easy to go through, even GW Bush did) : http://www.naharnet.com/domino/tn/NewsDesk.nsf/0/3EB18677E7D6A80BC22577FA0021EA18?OpenDocument [naharnet.com]

          I think it is a really likely choice for 2011. However, the Nobel committee could also estimate that Assange's popularity and presence in the medias protect him enough and will prefer to give it to a human right activist that really risks death penalty.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Weezul ( 52464 )

            I'd hope they'd seriously consider naming him if the U.S. actually charges him & attempts extradition, or simply kidnaps him of course. It would likely depend upon the consequences form the leaks otherwise, including other projects and disconnected leaks that seem inspired by wikileaks.

            Or they might name him just to avoid naming another who angers China, Russia, etc. There were many people who claimed the committee picked Obama just to avoid picking a Chinese dissident, like Liu Xiaobo, or accidentall

      • Re:Julian Assange (Score:5, Insightful)

        by characterZer0 ( 138196 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:35AM (#34561156)

        Probably by the advertisers. Time selects the Person of the Year based on how much advertising money they can get for the issue, not based on the person's impact on the world. Advertisers want theirs ads opposite stories about stuff people like, not opposite stories about exposing how corrupt governments are.

    • Re:Julian Assange (Score:4, Funny)

      by Peter Trepan ( 572016 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:26AM (#34561010)
      It should have been Assange, but Time magazine caved to government pressure! Now we attack! Our forces will go to the newsstands and look at Time magazine thousands of times per second, until there are no photons left for anyone else!

    • Re:Julian Assange (Score:5, Informative)

      by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:29AM (#34561074)

      The voting results were:

      1 Julian Assange 92 382024
      2 Recep Tayyip Erdogan 80 233639
      3 Lady Gaga 70 146378
      4 Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert 81 78145
      5 Glenn Beck 28 91746
      6 Barack Obama 58 27478
      7 Steve Jobs 61 24810
      8 The Chilean Miners 47 29124
      9 The Unemployed American 66 19605
      10 Mark Zuckerberg 52 18353

      What's the point in even asking for nominations if you choose some random lowlife anyway?

      • Because the results are fairly obviously rigged?
        I mean, just saying, if you look at the numbers and scores, something funny is going on there.

      • I'm not sure how to feel about both Lady Gaga and Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert beating out the President of the United States for most influential.

        I notice Suck-it-berg is at the bottom of the list - how did he win? Do they just not actually care about votes?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 3seas ( 184403 )

        How did many find out about the poll and to vote?
        Facebook?

        Shoot the messenger, not the media?

        Well I won't be buying that issue.
        and I'm not even unemployed.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by thijsh ( 910751 )
        I call shenanigans! Zuckerberg is not even 1/20th the man Assange is (actually 4,8% according to these stats)...

    • Re:Julian Assange (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Fractal Dice ( 696349 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:39AM (#34561194) Journal
      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.

      • 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.

        True, but both are driving towards complete transparency. Facebook is doing to people (on a small level, to their friends) what Wikileaks is doing to corporations. I have seen many people break-up, lose their jobs, or get seriously reprimanded for things found on Facebook.

        Facebook wasn't the first social network, but it was the one that "stuck" with the general public. For that reason, Facebook has changed the way people use the Internet, much like Youtube and Google did in the past. That is why Mark is the

      • Facebook is about ME!!!! ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME!

        Wikileaks is about, I can't believe the let that Palin girl get to the finals, and where is his birth certificate? Did you see that dress Kim had on?

        Truly, Facebook is the perfect name for the ME generation. It is the perfect distraction from the real world they would have to pause and think about.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sir_Sri ( 199544 )

      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

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Weezul ( 52464 )

        Assange has been the one publicly articulating the philosophy that's finally motivating the leakers like Manning, the unnamed U.S. bank executives who's stuff comes out in January, etc. And he started articulating it long before the wikileaks site was founded.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mqduck ( 232646 )

      It should have been Assange, yes. But even assuming it's *not* going to be Assange, why the hell should it be Mark Zuckerberg? What makes him the person of this particular year? Did Facebook do anything new in 2010 while I was avoiding it like the plague?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gmuslera ( 3436 )
      We are reserving Assange for the Nobel Peace Prize. The fun part will be if his plane stops in Sweden when going to receive it.

    • No. I would say Bradly Manning, as he's the one facing the rest of his life in a cell, paying the price for all the lavish praise the Internet is lumping on Julian Assange.

      • .. Assange is the one articulating the philosophy that's motivating Manning and many others to leak documents.

        Manning's presumed fours leaks may be remembered as an incredible act of daring self sacrifice and patriotism, but he's ultimately a guy who read someone else's philosophy and implemented it.

  • Good choice (Score:3, Interesting)

    by commodore64_love ( 1445365 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:20AM (#34560920) Journal

    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.

    • Email is "kind of silly," but it did enable me to reconnect with old high school friends that I have not seen or heard from in many years. What makes Facebook so special, exactly? We were all connected to each other by the Internet long before Facebook debuted.

      • Re:Good choice (Score:4, Informative)

        by commodore64_love ( 1445365 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:35AM (#34561164) Journal

        >>>Email

        I didn't know my old classmates' addresses so could not contact them by email. With facebook I can just drag-out the old yearbook and search for real names, or search for people in my graduation year. Also located an old teacher that I liked. (He's retired.)

        • I didn't know my old classmates' email addresses, so I used a search engine to locate them.
          I didn't know my old classmates' email addresses, so I used a directory service to locate them.

          I have personally reconnected with old friends, not using Facebook, with about as much trouble as it would take you to log on to Facebook and search for those friends.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dc29A ( 636871 ) *

          I always wondered if people don't bother keeping contact with their classmates using more traditional means (email, phone), why do they bother reconnecting with them using Facebook? You didn't keep contact for 10-15 years, making one assume that these people were either boring, not classifiable as 'friends' or simply idiots, and now suddenly with Facebook there is this urge to reconnect. To the people who matter to me, I kept contact with them using traditional means, because I like their company/friendship

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Inda ( 580031 )
            I remember all my school chums as being hormonal teenage twats. They probably remember me in the same way. Now approaching our forties, I doubt any of us fit into the immature and giggly brackets but that doesn't mean they are now worth the effort.

            Plenty of new people have entered my social circle over the last 20 years. Some are still in it, some have left. C'est la vie.
  • Connected half a billion people? When last I checked, we were already connected before Facebook...

    "We live in the United States of Amnesia..." - Gore Vidal

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mibe ( 1778804 )
      Would you mind elaborating on that? It sounds like you're saying that Facebook hasn't changed much, which would be ridiculous. What's this whole internets thing anyway? I could buy things before that, couldn't I? And talk to people remotely, and send letters. Yeah it's not the same as saying the internet hasn't changed anything, but it's only because Facebook is part of the internet. Go to any college campus, anywhere, and find someone with a laptop. 999 times out of 1000, that person has Facebook open. If
      • The point was not that Facebook has not changed anything, but rather that the change is not the simple fact that people are able to communicate with each other. The fact that Facebook is now used by 500 million people to communicate with their friends (or perhaps not really their friends) is not exactly revolutionary. The Internet was the revolutionary technological development that connected billions of people to each other; Facebook has only affected a change in how people use the Internet to communicat
  • Read Time Magazine?

  • Time cops out again (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NotInfinitumLabs ( 1150639 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:23AM (#34560974)
    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?
    • I hope the Time Cops aren't actually out again. I thought Jean-Claude Van Damme was more or less washed up.

  • TIME shows how irrelevant it has become. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Much like "The Oscars" and "Playboy", TIME is an old business shaped around an old business model that is drawing its last few breaths. So hey let's name a new-kid-billionaire as Person of the Year instead of someone that has done something - that'll draw new business in!

  • So what does Zuckerberg do for an encore — Academy Award, maybe?"

    I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you win Academy Awards for, generally, being IN or at least involved IN the production of a movie. The movie The Social Network was done without Zuckerberg's involvement or even approval. If it were probable to win an award for having nothing to do with a movie, Idiocracy would have bestowed an avalanche of awards on the American political and business leadership.

  • Big Deal (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:33AM (#34561136)

    I won it [time.com] in 2006.

  • I appear to have broken slashdot.

    My stories now load in a way that I have to click "More" a few times to get all comments.

    Is there any way to have them load all comments by default, and is there any way to have it set that the majority of comments are abbreviated by default?

    I want to do this with D2, and at least comments were fully expanded a few days ago before I broke it so it is possible....

    I know I shouldn't post here but there isn't exactly a tech support line....any help appreciated!

  • Breaking news (Score:5, Funny)

    by dsavi ( 1540343 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:46AM (#34561290) Homepage
    Today Time Magazine announced the Person of the Year 2007.

  • Applaud (Score:2, Interesting)

    by NuKe_MoNgOoSe ( 1941452 )
    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

  • Times Magazine windows Coward Of The Year award (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MouseR ( 3264 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:51AM (#34561352) Homepage

    For being too pussy to admit Assange has had greater impact, as noted by the reader vote.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MouseR ( 3264 )

      Damn I hate automatic spelling correction...

      ^ should have read wins.

    • For being too pussy to admit Assange has had greater impact

      Who might indeed have won if hadn't been taken in by some easy pussy. Assange should have known from reading history that using female agents to ensnare unsuspecting male targets is a time honored intelligence agency trick. The East Germans and the Stasi in particular were masters of this sort of operation. It should go without saying to any man in a position of power: beware of easy pussy, it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.

      • It should go without saying to any man in a position of power: beware of easy pussy, it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.

        Somebody should tell Tiger Woods.

  • Lets ignore privacy and the true facebook owner (Score:3)

    by zero0ne ( 1309517 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @10:57AM (#34561450) Journal

    So we have a company that has no interest in maintaining at least some privacy [slashdot.org] for its users.

    We also have a company that, as far as I know, is still in the courts regarding ownership [slashdot.org].

    Yet, somehow this CEO gets nominated as the person of the year? I wonder how much he had to pay for this.

    This is of course ignoring the fact that he wasn't even in the top 5 of public nominations.

    • It's all shameless promotion and marketing, whomever has the most to gain(biggest ego/deepest pockets/etc) buys the award.
      I've read a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame runs $25,000, wonder what POTY costs?

      Does anyone still think awards are recognitions of achievement? I thought we all learned that lesson last year [nobelprize.org]...

  • If that is "Person of the year...." most likely to rip off your personal information and sell it, then the correct choice was made. Last I heard on the TV news is that WikiLeaks' Julian Assange was running away with it in the poll, someone must have been doing some serious clicking to not make it turn into another PR disaster for governments.

  • That rag still exists? Wow, I thought they might have gone the way of the dodo by now.

    Seriously, I remember picking one up when I was in some waiting room a few years ago and it was like the ad flyers I get in my mailbox but they spent the extra dime to include a few staples.

  • I still don't understand why we are heaping so much praise on someone who has driven us to waste so much time. And no, I'm not saying I could have done it better; I would not have attempted to program anything like facebook because I would have seen it as a waste of time from the beginning. Nonetheless, what is the big deal, really? I don't see how his work has in any way improved life for anyone other than himself, or how this is important enough to warrant such honors.

    If the movie about his life wins

  • other than the fact that I have to listen to so many people talk about facebook.

    and get off my lawn !

  • So what does Zuckerberg do for an encore?

    If history is any guide, he'll spend the rest of his life depleting his large pile of money on failed startups and hobbies. Currently the popular way to waste a large fortune is building spaceships.

  • And Time magazine supported the Vietnam War.

    Who cares!

  • And facebook is a leading aspect of the "new tech". By tech I mean alternative energy, electric vehicles, stem cells, genetic engineering, smart phones, social computing, etc. Pardon the pun, but Zuckerberg is the face of this current tech forefront. And he is the archetype of the GenY 20,30-somethings who will lead the current wave of tech. No, I dont think he a saint nor the smartest tech guy out there.

    P.S. I still say "may" because I am not sure if this recession will wallow for another decade, like

  • Really? For re-inventing the BBS? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tekrat ( 242117 ) on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @01:57PM (#34564144) Homepage Journal

    Listen, I could understand if Edison was man of the year for inventing the light-bulb... But, if twenty years later, everyone had forgotten about it, and then suddenly, some other dude re-invents the lgihtbulb, and is made "man of the year", then TIME clearly has no actual journalists left and their ability to do in-depth analysis is out the window.

    And this is the case with Zuckerberg. All he has done is re-package the BBS into a web-based app. The back-end to Facebook could be Citadel, for all we know. Hell, Softarc's "First-Class" BBS/groupware product had a web-based front end before there was a Facebook. It's all been done before, it's just that this time around, this particular idiot was in the right place at the right time. He got rich, and thousands of other Sysops didn't.

    Heck, for a while it appeared that Myspace was going to trounce Facebook. I'd say, rather than make Zuckerberg "man of the year" make Zuckerberg's PR Agent "Man of the Year" -- *That's* the guy that worked harder than anyone.

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