14 DAY TRIAL // Time Magazine has chosen Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg as this year's Person of the Year. The choice is not surprising, in retrospect, but there were some serious contenders, especially WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Nonetheless, Facebook's chief vision maker takes the title and gets extensive coverage in the special edition of the publication.
It's hard to argue against the effect the site has had on the lives of hundreds of millions around the world, but here's Time Magazine's explanation for its choice.
"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, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year," Time Magazine wrote.
The magazine goes to great length describing the site and its impact but focuses even more on the man himself. Not that Zuckerberg has been lacking in media attention at any point in the last few months, but the profile is probably the most complete and very likely the most accurate in the mainstream media to date.
The profile goes against the persona of Mark Zuckerberg from The Social Network, a somewhat loosely based account of Facebook's early days that's a sure win for the next Oscars, and paints him as a genius as interested in social psychology as he is in coding.
While not without his quirks, and not few, Zuckerberg is not the fast talking robot impervious to other people's feelings from the movie, rather a visionary that is focused on his goal and nothing else. The whole piece is worth reading.
As always, a few runners up were profiled as well, the most interesting of which is a person who's been in the media perhaps more than anyone else in the past month, WikiLeaks founder, leader and public face, Julian Assange. He actually won the online poll for Time Magazine's Person but perhaps his impact came to late in the year for him to be awarded the main title.