Mark Zuckerberg is Time's person of the year

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time magazine's "Person of the Year".

At 26, Zuckerberg is the youngest to win the title of the person or thing that has most influenced the culture and the news during the past year since the first one chosen, Charles Lindbergh; he was 25 when he was named in 1927.

Mr Zuckerberg beat the Queen by just two weeks, she was 26 when she was named in 1952.

Mr Zuckerberg has put himself on the map not only as one of the world's youngest billionaires, but also as a prominent newcomer to the world of philanthropy.

Earlier this year, he pledged 100 million dollars over five years to the Newark, New Jersey, school system. Now, he is in the company of media titans Carl Icahn, 74, Barry Diller, 68, and others who have joined Giving Pledge, an effort led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett to commit America's wealthiest people to step up their charitable donations.

Mr Zuckerberg owns about a quarter of Facebook's shares.

He has built Facebook into an international phenomenon by stretching the lines of social convention and embracing a new and far more permeable definition of community. In this new world, users are able to construct a social network well beyond what would ever be possible face-to-face.

"I'm trying to make the world a more open place," Mr Zuckerberg says in the "bio" line of his own Facebook page.

Born in Mr Zuckerberg's Harvard university room, the site has in six years grown to more than 500 million users worldwide and is worth billions.

Facebook was the subject of director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's film "The Social Network. It features a dark portrayal of Mr Zuckerberg by Jesse Eisenberg