Times 2010 Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg

Excerpts:

Almost seven years ago, in February 2004, when Zuckerberg was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard, he started a Web service from his dorm. It was called Thefacebook.com, and it was billed as "an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges." This year, Facebook — now minus the the — added its 550 millionth member. 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.

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This is the modus operandi of Facebook and the ecosystem of developers who create applications for it: move into a market and take it over by making it social, as the in-house parlance has it. They have one big weapon, the social graph, and it's a category killer. Games are another good example. There's a company called Zynga that makes games designed to be played on Facebook. They're laughably simple by today's big-budget, high-concept standards, but they're social. In FarmVille, you can visit your friends' farms. In Mafia Wars you can take a hit out on your friends. Mafia Wars currently has 19 million players. FarmVille has 54 million. Investors value Zynga, which is only four years old, at $5.4 billion. That's more than Electronic Arts, which is the second largest games publisher in the world.

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Times 2010 Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg via Time

My thoughts:

Mark Zuckerberg is truly a genius in his own right. Though Facebook isn't the first social networking website, it is unquestionably the best and most successful one hands down. I myself own accounts on numerous social networking sites, including (but not limited to) Friendster, Tagged, Hi-5, MySpace and Bebo. I can't remember the last time I checked either of those. However, I've checked my Facebook multiple times today. I'm probably going to check back again after this blog. I enjoy checking in with old friends and associates on a day to day basis, often times sharing my likes and dislikes with the world and partaking in eye-opening discussions with those whom, otherwise, I could never confer with. Facebook has a very bright future as long as it keeps up the good work!