And The Winner Is::Zuckerberg's Facebook

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg named Time magazine's person of the year

The Facebook co-founder named Time's person of the year 'for changing how we all live our lives'

Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook, was todaynamed Time magazine's 2010 person of the year.

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 magazine's annual accolade is given to the person or thing judged to have most influenced the culture and the news during the past year for good or for ill.

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.

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.

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.

Assange comfortably won the readers' choice award for Time's 2010 person of the year, announced earlier this week. He beat Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, by more than 230,000 votes to scoop the prize.

Time's decision has not gone down well among Assange's supporters. Many commenters on Time's official announcement are critical of the magazine's choice.

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."

But Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, is marked out as one of the world's youngest billionaires – and now one of the youngest recipients of Time's prestigious accolade.

"In less than seven years, Zuckerberg [has] wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the US," said Grossman.

"We have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here."

Zuckerberg is also an unlikely philanthropist. Earlier this month, hepledged to give away at least half of his fortune to charitable causes as part of a campaign led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and businessman Warren Buffett. In September, Zuckerberg pledged to donate $100m(£63m) over five years to the Newark and New Jersey school system.

"People wait until late in their career to give back. But why wait when there is so much to be done?" said Zuckerberg last week.

Zuckerberg's dormroom creation registered its 500 millionth user earlier this year. Now thought to have about 600 million registered Facebook users worldwide, the cocksure computer scientist says it is "almost guaranteed" to reach 1 billion users eventually.

Asked whether the outcome of the readers' poll is taken into account during the decision-making process, a Time spokeswoman said: ""Time's editors gather ideas and feedback from a number of sources, including Time correspondents around the world, former people of the year, and our readers via our online poll.

"More than 1.5 million people voted in our Time.com poll this year; ultimately though, Time's person of the year is an editorial choice.