Mark Zuckerberg Is Time's 'Person of Year'

Lest you be too jealous of wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg, take solace: The Facebook founder may be Time's "Person of the Year" for 2010, but at 26, he's only the second youngest to clinch the title (that honor goes to Charles Lindbergh, Time's first selection). Highlights from its explanation of why Zuck was this year's selection, which it notes is not an honor, but a recognition of "the power of individuals to shape our world":

• "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."

• "Like two of our runners-up this year, Julian Assange and the Tea Party, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have a whole lot of veneration for traditional authority ... Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends."
• "He is the same age as Queen Elizabeth when she was Person of the Year, for 1952. But unlike the Queen, he did not inherit an empire; he created one. (The Queen, by the way, launched a Facebook page this year.)"
• Ultimately, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg gets the title "For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; 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."

(More Time's Person of the Year stories.)