O'Brien: Zuckerberg's well-deserved honor from Time

Considering that you couldn't turn on your TV, go to the movies or hit the bookstore this year without seeing Mark Zuckerberg, it's absolutely fitting that the 26-year-old founder of Facebook was named Time magazine's "Person of the Year."

At the same time it's astonishing that, at such an early stage of his career, Zuckerberg finds himself on the receiving end of an honor that places him in some remarkable company.

He is the second-youngest to receive the nod, edged out only by 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh in 1927. He becomes only the second recipient from Silicon Valley, following Andy Grove in 1997 -- who was honored almost 30 years after founding Intel. Among other tech titans, the list is a short
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one: Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com in 1999 and Bill Gates in 2005 (though for his charitable works).

Not on the list: Steve Jobs. The Google guys. Marc Andreessen.

Because Facebook has become such a core part of our online lives so quickly, we often take it for granted.

So it sometimes takes recognition like this to force us to consider the magnitude of Zuckerberg's accomplishments.

In case you're one of the handful of people not on Facebook, let me quickly sum it up: Staggering.

Or, as Time's managing editor put it, he was chosen "for changing how we all live our lives in ways that are innovative and even optimistic."

"Facebook is one of the largest human institutions ever
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created," said Michael S. Malone, author and longtime Silicon Valley historian. "What other organization has ever included 500 million people? For that alone, he's a historic figure."

Actually, the official number of Facebook users has shot past 550 million. And it's on course to hit 1 billion, perhaps as soon as next year. That's one out of every six people on the planet.

People can debate whether Facebook is a force for good, a brilliant and welcome enhancement to our human experience that brings us closer together. Or whether it's the greatest time suck ever invented.

You don't have to like Facebook. You do have to respect and marvel at it.

And because of what it has done, and what it's likely to do, Facebook is quite simply the most important company on the Web, even ahead of Google.

"This is a real honor and it is recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to be a part of," Zuckerberg posted to his Facebook Wall -- naturally -- on Wednesday. "I'm just happy to be a part of it too."

It is no surprise that most of us seem anxious to understand what goes on inside the head of the man who started it all and remains at its epicenter. It's why in 2010 we saw a movie about Zuckerberg ("The Social Network"), an authoritative biography ("The Facebook Effect"), an appearance on Oprah and his second "60 Minutes" profile.

Such adulation would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago. Facebook, after all, wasn't even the first social network when Zuckerberg cobbled it together back in 2004 in his Harvard University dorm room. And as recently as two years ago, Facebook was the distant No. 2 social networking site to MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch saw as his ticket to online riches. And at times, it seems like Zuckerberg was doing his best to kneecap his own creation, constantly pushing new features that triggered user revolts and privacy howls.

Also, don't forget, the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley was that Zuckerberg was a bonehead for not accepting a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo.

But none of this slowed Facebook's momentum.

Even as Zuckerberg has reached this pinnacle, it's hard to escape the feeling that he's just getting started. With all this power, all this influence, all this potential, the biggest question now is: What will Zuckerberg do with it?

"He's built something wonderful and amazing and worth all kind of awards," Steve Blank, an entrepreneur and author of "The Secret History of Silicon Valley," wrote to me in an e-mail. "But it's kind of like Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize -- he now needs to earn it."