Zuckerberg, 26, beat a string of notable personalities to the accolade – including WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. The 33 rescued Chilean miners and the rightwing US Tea Party movement were also named as runners-up.
Time credited Zuckerberg with connecting more than half a billion people with through Facebook and mapping the social relations among them. And because Facebook's 26-year-old CEO also is credited with creating a new system of exchanging information that is changing how people live their lives, he was named Person of the Year.
The Time editor, Richard Stengel, announced the winner on NBC Television's Today show. Ben Bernanke, the cerebral American economist, took the prize last year, following US president Barack Obama in 2008 and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin in 2007.
"Hopefully, Time is giving him the recognition because he is the youngest tech baron to pledge to give away billions -- in his case, before they've even been monetized. Bill Gates had practically retire before he got the Time kudo in 2005. More likely, they know Zuckerberg's face will sell magazines, and they can only dream of being in touch with an audience like the one Facebook touches every minute."
Zuckerberg was honoured "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", Time journalist Lev Grossman said.
"I actually thought Julian Assange had a bigger impact this year because he moved governments," Enderle said. "It made me feel like they were pressured to take the less controversial person. Facebook is very powerful but it isn't yet a force for anything. Twitter is actually stronger when it comes to world changing events. But Zuckerberg would have been my second choice."
The most notable runner-up is Assange, who is currently in prison pending an appeal against a decision yesterday to grant him bail over sexual allegations in Sweden.
Matthias, for example, says: "Why do you let people vote if you just pick your own candidate? Assange was first! Shameless cowards." Nello Margiotta commented: "Mark Zuckerberg who? it's only a political choice of the director of Time Magazine; obviously for people in the net the person of the year is Julian Assange."
"The social-networking platform he invented is closing in on 600 million users," he added. "In a single day, about a billion new pieces of content are posted on Facebook. It is the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet. Facebook is now the third-largest country on Earth and surely has more information about its citizens than any government does. Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, is its T-shirt-wearing head of state."
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