TIME Magazine Names Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year

Facebook founder and the world's youngest billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2010.

The editors explain their choice:

At 26, Zuckerberg is a year older than our first Person of the Year, Charles Lindbergh — another young man who used technology to bridge continents. He is the same age as Queen Elizabeth when she was Person of the Year, for 1952. But unlike the Queen, he did not inherit an empire; he created one. (The Queen, by the way, launched a Facebook page this year.) Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is a recognition of the power of individuals to shape our world. For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them (something that has never been done before); for creating a new system of exchanging information that has become both indispensable and sometimes a little scary; and finally, for changing how we all live our lives in ways that are innovative and even optimistic, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year.

The story of the founding of Facebook is depicted in the movie The Social Network starring Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg, adapted from a fictionalization into a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher. The movie has been winning several  end-of-year critics awards and must be considered one of the frontrunners for the Best Picture Oscar.