You know how it is: you see a tabby cat next to a trash can, you toss it in. Alas, this random act of cruelty was caught on closed-circuit TV and put on the Web. In no time, the puss pusher was identified. Mary Bale, 45, a British bank worker, said she was sorry, but "it was just a cat." After that, claws were out.
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