We have entered the Facebook age, and he is the man who brought us here. For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year. Amazon Kindle brings you an extended version of the cover profile by TIME senior writer Lev Grossman, with an introduction by TIME managing editor Richard Stengel. Read how the Person of the Year has changed how we live our lives in ways that are innovative and even optimistic.
If you are reading this, chances are you have a Facebook account. In fact, probably most of your friends and relatives are also on Facebook, and you find yourself communicating with them more via this social network than all other communications channels combined. With almost 600 million users Facebook has become the de facto way of getting online, and its meteoric rise closely mimics the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, and it is predicted that by 2012 every other internet user will have a Facebook … more