Mark Zuckerberg is Time Magazine “Person of the Year” 2010

Chilean miners Facebook Hamid Karzai Julian Assange Mark Zuckerberg Matt Lauer Rick Stengel Steve Jobs Tea Party The Social Network Time Time Magazine Time Person of the Year Time Person of the Year 2010

7:52 am, December 15th, 2010

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On Monday, “The Today Show” anchor Matt Lauer sat down with Time managing editor Rick Stengel to discuss the six finalists for the magazine’s annual “Person of the Year” cover.

At the time, Stengel explained the winner is “the person or thing that has most influenced the culture and the news in the past year, both good or for ill.”

On the short list were the Chilean miners, Steve Jobs, Julian Assange, Hamid Karzai, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Tea Party.

Today, Stengel announced that Time‘s “Person of the Year” for 2010 is… Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The reason, according to Time, was that “more than half a billion people on the planet live in a world created by Mark Zuckerberg. The good news is, their friends all live there too. Zuckerberg founded the social networking site Facebook in his college dorm six years ago, but 2010 was the year that Facebook reached critical mass, both in sheer quantity of users and in its presence (through its ‘connect’ features) all over the Web.”

Time also noted, “Zuckerberg spent much of the year fighting privacy concerns, and this fall he had to shake off a movie [The Social Network] that depicted him as an alienated loner, hacking to get girls. But the world’s youngest billionaire has no plans to slow Facebook’s growth, nor does it show any sign of stopping.”

What do you think of Time‘s choice?

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