Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg named Time Person of the Year

Dec 15, 2010, 16:25 GMT

Washington - Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old founder of social networking website Facebook, was selected Wednesday as Time magazine's Person of the Year.

The distinction has been awarded since 1927, when it was initially called Man of the Year. The publication said that the young billionaire deserved the honour for 'creating a new system of exchanging information' and 'changing how we all live our lives.'

'In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity in a single network... 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,' Time explained.

Last year the person selected was head of the US Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, and in 2008 the magazine chose Barack Obama, shortly after he was elected president.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian national, won the readers' choice vote, but the 39-year-old did not get the final nod from the magazine's editors.

Zuckerberg's win comes after Facebook, which he founded in 2004 as a website for his fellow undergraduates at Harvard University, amassed 500 million members, far eclipsing its once larger rival MySpace and challenging Google as the world's dominant web company.

Yet as its prominence has grown Facebook has come in for increased scrutiny and criticism over its privacy policies.

Zuckerberg was also negatively portrayed in one of the year's top movies, The Social Network, which chronicles the founding of the company and shows him to be an anti-social geek obsessed with his software creations. The young billionaire has however polished his image in recent months with high-profile charitable donations, and last week joined an influential group of magnates who have pledged to donate at least half their fortunes to charity.

Facebook, which is still privately held, is worth an estimated 43 billion dollars, while Zuckerberg's fortune is calculated at approximately 7 billion dollars.