Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time's person of the year, the magazine announced Wednesday.

"For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is Time's 2010 Person of the Year," Time said on its Web site.

Zuckerberg beat out the Tea Party, Afghanistan's president Hamid Karzai, WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, and the Chilean miners to capture the coveted title. He joins a group that in past years has included Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and You. The magazine's first person of the year was Charles Lindbergh in 1927.

"Being named as Time Person of the Year is a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected. I'm happy to be a part of that," Zuckerberg said in a statement.

"Zuckerberg is part of the last generation of human beings who will remember life before the Internet, though only just," Time wrote. "He started Facebook as a way for people on college campuses to communicate with and keep track of one another — and occasionally poke each other and leer at each other's pictures — but in a broader sense he was firing the first shot in his generation's takeover of the Internet."

That magazine provides a lengthy overview of Zuckerberg's life and the Facebook's beginnings. Those of you who thought Facebook had reached its peak, think again.

"He's just getting started," Time said. "What looks like a meteoric rise to the rest of us, he sees as an opening act. Because now that Facebook has scaled up to a species-level event, the real work can start: taking a 550 million–person network out on the highway and seeing what it can do."