On Memorial Day, he was a jobless veteran facing an obscenity charge. By June 9, Greene was the Democratic nominee for one of South Carolina's Senate seats. Judging by his interviews, he was targeting voters who like their leaders shambolic. He lost, proving that while democracy has its foibles, it works, more or less.
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 live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year