A mustachioed pastor wants to torch a book in Florida. The world ignores him, right? Wrong. Jones' plan to burn a Koran on Sept. 11 drew comment from the Pentagon, White House and Vatican, plus most media pundits. In the end, all he ignited was fury.
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