Zukerberg, Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ – Wikileaks founder, Assange, runner up

Mark Zukerberg has beaten Julian Assange, Hamid Karzai, The Chilean Miners and The Tea party to be named Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

At 25 Zukerberg in one of the youngest receivers of the award although this is not the first time Time has given it to social media recipients, in 2006 social web users were, surprisingly, given the honour.

Each year Time Magazine awards people who have made a significant impact on the global events to be their Person of the Year.  The award can be given to persons or groups who have most changed the world, and not always for the better, in the past year.

Discussing this year’s award, Time editor Rick Stengel said Zuckerberg was awarded the honour to 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 Zukerberg is TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year.”

In what Time are calling an in-depth interview Zukerberg discusses the establishment of Facebook, the recent film and the current state of web privacy. He also outlines his vision for the next five years of the social web. Zuckerberg says,

It’s about the idea that most applications are going to become social, and most industries are going to be rethought in a way where social design and doing things with your friends is at the core of how these things work. If the last five years was the ramping up, I think that the next five years are going to be characterized by widespread acknowledgement by other industries that this is the way that stuff should be and will be better.”

The CNN owned publication has continued a trend of  provoking controversy with its nominees this year.  The controversial runners up for 2010 are the right-wing US political organisation, The Tea Party, the embattled Afghan president Hamid Karzai, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and, perhaps least controversially, The Chilean Miners.

The 2010 winners are,

1. Mark Zukerberg
2. The Tea Party
3. Hamid Karzai
4. Julian Assange
5. The Chilean Miners