One day they're selling stuff to tourists, the next they're heroes. Alioune Niasse, Duane Jackson and Lance Orton all were credited with helping avert a car-bomb attack in Times Square in May. Festooned with the garlands of fame media interviews, autograph requests, phone calls from the famous and powerful they staggered under the strain: there was a spat about who saw what first, and Niasse, whose English is spotty, felt excluded. "It's starting to get back to normal," says Orton, "but it's taken a heavy toll on my business."
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