Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is Time?s Person of the Year

The world?s youngest billionaire and social networking website Facebook co-founder 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine?s 2010 Person of the Year on Wednesday.

Credited for revolutionising social networking and a subject of heated debates over his website?s privacy stands, Zuckerberg was named as the person who influenced, for better or for worse, the events of the year most.

?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,? the magazine said.

Facebook, with over 500 million active users (as of July 2010), started off as a social networking site for students of the Harvard University in 2004 which Zuckerberg attended and today stands as the most used website in its category with a projected 2010 revenue of USD 2 billion.

Zuckerberg beat the likes of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Afghan President Hamid Karzai to get the top spot.

?While probably not as controversial as Julian (and certainly less governmentally despised), he’s no doubt revolutionized the way 500 million people share photos of each other chugging beers, and exchange status updates lamenting the their recent breakups,? technology blog Gizmodo wrote upon his nomination.

2010 even saw him as a subject to the critically-acclaimed Hollywood flick The Social Network.

He recently joined Bill Gates, George Lucas, Warren Buffett, and 50 other billionaires, by agreeing to donate the majority of his wealth to charity, as part of the Giving Pledge movement Gates launched back in August.

This year, Zuckerberg pledged a USD 100 million donation to the school system in Newark, New Jersey.