Zuckerberg is 'Time' person of 2010

Time magazine has named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as its 2010 Person of the Year.

The magazine defines the Person of the Year as the person who, for better or for worse, does the most to influence the events of the year.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the Chilean miners and the Tea Party were named runners-ups.

Time editor Richard Stengel announced this year's winner on NBC Television's Today show.

Time said that 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."

"Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but 70 per cent of Facebook users live outside the US It's a permanent fact of our global social reality. We have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here," it added.

"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," it concluded.

Born in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook while a student at Harvard University in 2004.

In July 2010, Facebook announced it had signed up its 500-millionth user, almost four years after the site became widely available to the public.

However, it hasn't been all plain sailing for Zuckerberg. He has had to weather several lawsuits from people who claim to have built the site with him.  In addition, the film The Social Network which came out in October and is loosely based on the Facebook founder presented a less-than-flattering portrayal of the 26-year-old.

Earlier this week, Zuckerberg became the latest billionaire to joing The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic campaign led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Zuckerberg said he intented to donate at least half his wealth to charity.

Time started the annual Person of the Year selection in 1927.  Last year, US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was awarded the coveted title.