TIME Magazine can’t stress enough the fact that their Person of the Year award “is not an honor”. In 1938, Adolf Hitler was named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year. Unlike Hitler, however, Mark Zuckerberg fast tracked the world to complete connectivity through a global social network. And at a baby-ish 26 years of age, billionaire college dropout Zuckerberg is responsible for leading 550 million (or 1 out of every 12 people) into the social network at an astounding rate of 700,000 a day. If 700,000 is too big a number to comprehend, imagine that if you lived for 700,000 days you’d be 1,918 years old; which by that time Facebook would have added over 490 billion members, or about 72 times the Earth’s current population. Starting to get the picture? There’s no doubt that Facebook is a social revolution that won’t go the way of the dinosaur - *cough* MySpace *cough*. But the bigger question is where will it go?

The fundamental problem and question facing our generation is a private issue; and by private issue I mean it’s everybody’s business. The entire world is up in arms about losing their privacy to status updates, Tweets, Google Maps, YouTube, and even Kinect; though, they’d be hard pressed to stop using the Internet to yammer about it. While Facebook may not be upfront about it, Zuckerberg’s world of social integration gives its users their own choice as to how much privacy they allocate themselves. For instance, you can change your privacy settings to allow only certain people to see what you post on your wall, who posts on your wall, where you live, what you do, and how to reach you offline. Or you could simply avoid posting private things, or even stop posting altogether. Just don’t feel left out when the rest of the world lives in the cloud and you have your precious privacy all to yourself on the ground. According to CNN, privacy is dead, and either you get with the program (literally) or cease to exist (figuratively, of course).

While no one can be sure where innovators such as Mark Zuckerberg will take us with social networking, he certainly has the Internets going nuts and deserves to not be honored with TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year, Hitler or not.