Facebook CEO Zuckerberg, Time's Person of the Year

New York, Dec 16: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the world's most popular social networking website Facebook, has been selected as Time magazine's Person of the Year. Zuckerberg overcame a tough competition from whistle-blower website WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Time's annual designation honors the person, group, idea or even machine that "most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year."

"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 percent of Facebook users live outside the U.S. 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," said Time magazine in its cover story.

The 26-year-old Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004 with co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin from their student digs at Harvard University. Within nine months, Facebook recorded more than one million active users.

The popularity increased further and people across the globe embraced the Facebook. In 2009, it's became the most used social network. In 2010, Facebook celebrated 500 million active users mark and still continuing its 'on fire' growth.

"This is a real honor and it is recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to be a part of. I'm just happy to be a part of it too," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page.

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