Zuckerberg Named TIME Person Of The Year

Mark Zuckerberg officially has joined the ranks of Barack Obama, Pope John Paul II and Adolph Hitler.

Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, was named TIME Magazine's Person of the Year, the award given to the most influential person in the world since 1927. The award caps off a memorable year for Zuckerberg, one in which Facebook, the social network he created, blossomed beyond 500 million members and a movie, The Social Network, was made about the early days of Facebook.

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, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year, TIME editor Rick Stengel said in a statement.

In a wide-ranging interview with the magazine, Zuckerberg discussed The Social Network, Wikileaks, Facebook's future and much more. On the movie, starring Jessie Eisenberg, Zuckerberg said he found it funny what details they focused on getting right.

I think I owned every single T-shirt that they had me wearing. But the biggest thing that thematically they missed is the concept that you would have to want to do something-date someone or get into some ­final club-in order to be motivated to do something like this. It just like completely misses the actual motivation for what we're doing, which is, we think it's an awesome thing to do, Zuckerberg said in the interview.

Zuckberg is the first singular figure from technology to take home the award since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos won it in 1999. Andy Grove, an early employee of Intel, was also a winner of the award, back in 1997.