TIME mag bails on Assange, hails Mark Zuckerberg as Man of The Year a year past his prime date

Time magazine, which has gotten a whole better since it began publishing it's new editions on Thursday instead of Monday (and completely blows away a withering Newsweek), is creating lots of chatter on the blogosphere with their announcement this morning that Facebook inventor and owner Mark Zuckerberg is their Man of The Year.

The Tea Party as a group came in 2nd, and WikiLeaks Julian Assange came in third.  Speculation was that either Zuckerberg or Assange would be named by the mag as the Person of the Year, so at least Time doesn't have to deal with complaints from Joe Lieberman and other moralists that they're aiding and abetting a "terrorist" in New York Congressman Peter King's words.

But seriously, wouldn't Zuckerberg been a bit more cutting edge in 2009, or really 2008, when the social networking site really caught fire nationally, a couple of years after it was expanded from just being for college students?

Obviously, the immense artistic success of the David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin/Scott Rudin production of The Social Network also plays a huge part in Facebook being part of the zeitgeist,which of course is what TIME is trying to capture.   The editors explain:

More than anyone else on the world stage, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is at the center of these changes. Born in 1984, the same year the Macintosh computer was launched, he is both a product of his generation and an architect of it. The social-networking platform he invented is closing in on 600 million users. In a single day, about a billion new pieces of content are posted on Facebook. It is the connective tissue for nearly a tenth of the planet. Facebook is now the third largest country on earth and surely has more information about its citizens than any government does. Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, is its T-shirt-wearing head of state.