And so Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been selected ahead of Julian Assange as Time Magazine's Man of the Year. Many were expecting it was going to be Julian Assange from Wikileaks.
Anticipating the backlash, Time managing editor Julian Stengel from Time says the two are pretty much cut from the same cloth. "Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends. Both have a certain disdain for privacy: in Assange's case because he feels it allows malevolence to flourish; in Zuckerberg's case because he sees it as a cultural anachronism, an impediment to a more efficient and open connection between people."
Leaving aside the question of whether it should have been Zuckerberg or Assange, there's no doubt that the Harvard drop out is reshaping society's norms and behaviors through his social networking site.
And as the Huffington Post says, he has done it through five pretty smart moves. The first was to get users to create profiles using their actual identity and real names. Nicknames or screen names, while not banned, were not encouraged. The second was to knock back offers to merge with the likes of Friendster, Google, MySpace, Viacom, News Corp and Yahoo. Another was to introduce Facebook Platform that allowed developers to build applications on top of the site (think Farmville). Basically, that expanded the number of things you could do on Facebook. Another was to start with the colleges, targeting plugged-in, partying young adults eager to socialize, date, and meet new people. And finally, he brought in the right people.
One thing for sure, we're seeing the rise of the geeks. It started with that bespectacled drop out Bill Gates and then it was Steve Jobs. Now it's Mark Zuckerberg. The nerds are taking over the planet.
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