Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time magazine's "Person of the Year" for 2010. 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. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke received the honor last year. The 2008 winner was then-President-elect Barack Obama. The 2007 winner was Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Other previous winners have included Bono, President George W. Bush, and Amazon.com CEO and founder Jeff Bezos.
At 26, Zuckerberg is the youngest "Person of the Year" since the first one chosen, Charles Lindbergh, he was 25 when he was named in 1927. Time said Zuckerberg beat out Britain's Queen Elizabeth II by just two weeks, she was 26 when she was named in 1952.
Zuckerberg was a 19 year old sophomore at Harvard University in 2004 when he started a Web service called Thefacebook.com from his dorm. He has built Facebook into an international phenomenon by stretching the lines of social convention and embracing a new and far more permeable definition of community. In this new world, users are able to construct a social network well beyond what would ever be possible face-to-face.
This year, Facebook has more than 550 million users. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India. 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.
Earlier this year, he pledged $100 million over five years to the Newark, N.J. school system. Now, he's in the company of media titans Carl Icahn, 74, Barry Diller, 68, and others who have joined Giving Pledge, an effort led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett to commit the country's wealthiest people to step up their charitable donations.
