TIME Person of the Year 2010

Mark Zuckerberg has been announced as Time magazine’s person of the year 2010, “for changing how we all live our lives in ways that are innovative and even optimistic.” orn in 1984 in White Plains, New York, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is one of three children. Mr Zuckerberg excelled at science and classics at Ardsley High School before going on to Harvard to study computer science. Mr Zuckerberg created the social networking site Facebook in his penultimate year at Harvard with his flatmates and fellow Harvard students Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin. At first only available to Harvard students, Facebook’s popularity soon spiraled and the site expanded to surrounding universities. Following a cash injection, Mr Zuckerberg dropped out of university and moved the headquarters of Facebook Inc. to Palo Alto, California.

Zuckerberg’s accomplishments in 2010 are truly outstanding: he cemented Facebook’s status as the biggest social network and one of the hottestInternet companies, surging past 500 million users. He’s one of the world’s youngest billionaires, and recently he pledged to give the majority of his wealth to charity.

“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,” explains Time.

Not everyone agrees with the choice, however. WikiLeaks founder and owner Julian Assange was also a likely candidate, and many commenters over on Time think his accomplishments are far more important that Zuckerberg’s.

What do you think? Do you agree withTime’s choice, or would you prefer to have seen Julian Assange (or perhaps someone else) named the Person of the Year?