Pick the odd man out - Vladimir Putin,
Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Mark Zuckerberg.
The answer may not be difficult to
guess: Mark Zuckerberg.
Now the similarity. All of them
including the facebook creator have been TIME persons of the year - 2007, 2008,
2009, and 2010 respectively.
Vladimir Putin, the man responsible for
bringing Russia back to the great game of geopolitics after it was almost
on the verge of becoming a failed state.
Barack Obama, who won a historic
American election to become the 44th President of the United States and
the first African American to do this. A year later he won the Nobel Peace
Prize (2009) "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen
international diplomacy and cooperation between people.”
Ben Bernanke, the Chairman
of Federal Reserve (the central bank of the U.S) who prevented an
economic catastrophe. In 2009, Bernanke hurled unprecedented amounts of
money into the banking system in different ways, which lay the groundwork for the
Fed's eventual return to normality.
It is here that one is forced to stop
and think before moving on to the next candidate in the list. Mark Zukerberg’s
online directory ‘Facebook’ that connects people through social network may
have blossomed beyond 500 million in 2010 with a movie, The Social
Network, made about the early days of Facebook. And it may be true that one
out of every dozen people on planet now has a Facebook account.
But, when seen in the light of
Zukerberg’s predecessors that the esteemed TIME magazine has honoured, his
contribution seems insignificant.
TIME Magazine's Person of the Year, is
the award given since 1927 to the most influential person in the world in that
year.
2010 was a year when Julian Assange
founder of whistleblower website WikiLeaks captured headlines of almost all
mainstream dailies around the world and his revelations were debated in
Parliaments of most democracies.
According to a report in the Canada
based The Gazette (Montreal) Julian Assange was voted top newsmaker of the year
2010 by senior editors at Postmedia Network newspapers and canada.com.
The social networking business
Facebook's core business is social networking – something that has
already been tasted and enjoyed by other players in the field.
Take the examples of AOL, Tripod,
Friendster, Orkut, MySpace or LinkedIn. You might have believed the same thing
about any one of those social networks as you do now about Facebook.
AOL was considered ubiquitous and invincible. And yet it saw its
downfall just like the other aforementioned social networks did. MySpace was
described as one of the most wildly successful sites in 2006 when it had
amassed 124 million profiles in its two and a half years of existence.
So it is wrong if we say AOL, Orkut or MySpace lost and Facebook
won. The more appropriate statement will be MySpace won first and Facebook won
next. And something else will follow.
Interestingly, Julian Assange won the most votes in TIME
magazine’s 2010 Person of the Year poll. While Assange was148,383 votes over
the silver medalist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
came in 10th.
TIME’s
editor played safe by picking a less-controversial figure. However, the choice
itself became a controversy with numerous journalists and commentators alleging
that the magazine went with the safer choice, opting
for the 26-year-old billionaire over the
Australian hacker-turned-anti-secrecy advocate now
targeted by the U.S. Justice Department.
A TIME reader comments on TIME’s cover story of its Person of the
Year 2010 issue: “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 tells me, things like
this are not unusual.”
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