`Time' names Facebook founder 2010 Person of the Year

Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is 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.

"This year they passed 500 million users. ... The scale of Facebook is something that is transforming our lives. One in 10 people on the planet, and it's excluded in China where one in five people on the planet live," Time editor Richard Stengel said upon announcing the winner on NBC Television's `Today' show.

"It's not just a new technology. It's social engineering. It's changing the way we relate to each other. I actually think it's affecting human nature in a way that we have never even seen before."

"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 said on its web site.

Started as a web service Thefacebook.com when Zuckerberg was a 19-year old sophomore at Harvard University in 2004, Facebook's phenomenal popularity has made Zuckerberg one of the world's youngest billionaires and his privately held company is projected to have 2010 revenues of $2 billion, according to Time.

Zuckerberg has pledged $100 million in donation to the Newark, New Jersey, school system this year. He was also the subject of "The Social Network" a Hollywood movie.
The 26 year-old is the youngest winner since the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh was named the magazine's first person of the year in 1927 for his first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

Since then the Time honour has become a cultural reference in the US.