TIME'S 2010 Person of the Year

The annual accolade for "Person of the year" has been running since the 1920s, with winners such as Hitler, Barack Obama and Stalin picking up the award and appearing on the front page of the magazine. The winner is the figure who is determined to have the most influence on culture and news each year; not always in a positive way.

The Facebook co-founder, worth approximately £4.4 billion, is currently one of the richest people in the US at only 26 years of age. A recent film release in which Zuckerberg was the subject; The Social Network, has charted a rise in Facebook usage this year, leading to his position as one of the youngest recipients of Time’s prestigious award.

Almost seven years ago, in February 2004, when Zuckerberg was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard University, he started a Web service from his dorm. It was called Thefacebook.com.This year, Facebook added its 550 millionth member and it has 1,700 employees.. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day.

According to the editors at Time, Zuckerberg and Facebook have fundamentally changed the way people interact with each other and it’s changed how we define the concept of community. When you look at all of the things that seem to have been subsumed by Facebook, it’s hard to find some part of human activity that is totally Facebook-free.

Zuckerberg is part of the last generation of human beings who will remember life before the Internet, though only just. He was born in 1984 and grew up in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., the son of a dentist. Mark has three sisters, the eldest of whom, Randi, is now Facebook's head of consumer marketing and social-good initiatives. It was a supportive household that produced confident children. The young Mark was "strong-willed and relentless," according to his father Ed.

Earlier this month Zuckerberg became one of the latest billionaires to make a promise to give a large proportion of his wealth to charity.A group founded by Bill Gates and his wife, along with Warren Buffet, encourages the wealthiest Americans to publicly pledge to donate to charity. Zuckerberg is one of 17 new people to express their support to the group.