2010 Time Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO and co-founder is 2010 Time Person of the Year. He is chosen 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 live our lives, Time said.

But is Zuckerberg right for the title? Take a look at some of the comments posted in time.com about this 2010 Time Person of the Year.

From Evi1M4chine:

Guys, I’ve got a guy here working at TIME, who tells me that Zuckerberg paid to get his face on the cover. He also tell me, things like this are not unusual. Can’t tell if he’s lying, but his credentials check out. And he’s at the exactly right place to make it plausible.

From Facebook Rotten:

Zuckerberg was voted Time's so-called person of the year because Facebook offers Time a lot more potential upside than Wikileaks. Time can get eyeballs and demographic marketing info on users from FB. And possible advertising partnerships. Assange's Wikileaks does not offer this.

Time has a Facebook button so people can link stories from the site to their FB accounts. And like many news websites now, Time encourages readers to use their Facebook or other social media login credentials to post comments. Time gets access to people's info from Facebook when they login to Time via their Facebook account.

Choosing Zuckerberg was unethical given Time's relationship with Facebook. Saying that Zuckerberg's company allows people to connect in a new, empowering way is disengenuous and cynical. The point of FB is to make money on advertising and suck people's demographic info out of them for the advertisers and content partners such as Time.

Here's the list of the candidates for 2010 Time Person of the Year including Mark Zuckerberg:

1. Julian Assange
2. Glenn Beck
3. David Cameron
4. The Chilean Miners
5. Arne Duncan
6. Recep Tayyip Erdogan
7. Jonathan Franzen
8. Lady Gaga
9. Robert Gates
10. Tony Hayward
11. Hu Jintao
12. LeBron James
13. Steve Jobs
14. Hamid Karzai
15. David and Charles Koch
16. Liu Xiaobo
17. Barack Obama
18. Sarah Palin
19. Nancy Pelosi
20. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
21. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
22. The Unemployed American
23. J. Craig Venter
24. Elizabeth Warren, Mary Schapiro and Sheila Bair
25. Mark Zuckerberg