Mark Zuckerberg is Time’s Person of the Year

Mark Zuckerberg‘s image just keeps getting better and better.  (His eyes in this cover image are intense.)

Over the past couple of weeks alone, Zuckerberg has added to his philanthropic endeavors by joining the Giving Pledge. Then he had a monster 20-minute interview with 60 Minutes to announce a Facebook redesign and demonstrate his new media savoir-faire. Now, the Facebook CEO is Time‘s Person of the Year. Congrats to him!

Facebook has been a big deal for a few years now, so it’s kind of strange that he was chosen this year. But in any case, Zuckerberg’s interview with the magazine has some interesting points that PR pros might want to take note of.

Talking about the future of Facebook, which will include a continued “building out” of the platform, Zuckerberg says:

“It’s about the idea that most applications are going to become social, and most industries are going to be rethought in a way where social design and doing things with your friends is at the core of how these things work. If the last five years was the ramping up, I think that the next five years are going to be characterized by widespread acknowledgment by other industries that this is the way that stuff should be and will be better.”

Richard Stengel, Time‘s managing editor, also offers up his thoughts about how Zuckerberg and WikiLeaks EIC Julian Assange are “two sides of the same coin” on the issues of privacy and transparency.

Assange was a runner-up on the list for Person of the Year. Others were the Tea Party, Hamid Karzai, and the Chilean Miners.

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