One of the most famous routes in the technology world is the flight from Boston to San Francisco. The trip has been made by many a young engineer and would-be entrepreneur, leaving the halls of MIT and Harvard for the venture capital firms and start-up incubaters of Silicon Valley.

But not everyone is sold on the California dream. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said recently that, if he had it to do all over again, he would have given Silicon Valley the cold shoulder and stayed back east.

Speaking at an event called Startup School, Zuckerberg criticised the culture in Silicon Valley as "short-sighted", and said that, if he were to go back and start a new company, he would do it in Boston.

The comment makes for an interesting debate, not just because it comes from one of the biggest names in the business world today. Zuckerberg acknowledged that he could not have built Facebook without moving to Silicon Valley, but said that the growth of hubs in Boston, New York and London has made starting a company without moving to Silicon Valley a far more viable proposition.

Zuckerberg also made an interesting point about the culture of Silicon Valley and its short-term demands. The region has seen two major crashes in the past decade, the dot-com bust and the fallout from the economic turmoil, meaning that investors who have been burned want the assurance of getting their money back as soon as possible.

Perhaps Zuckerberg is on to something. Firms in other regions could be more patient with their investments and let entrepreneurs operate with a slightly looser leash. London has its own economic challenges to navigate, but there is some merit to the idea that firms moving into Tech City will have more time to turn a profit than if they started up in Sunnyvale or San Francisco.

If the billions of dollars, hugely successful company and biographical film weren't enough to boost Marc Zuckerberg's ego into the stratosphere, the latest bit of news should do the trick.

The Facebook founder has been awarded Time magazine's 'Person of the Year' title. With hundreds of millions of users, the magazine finally decided that Zuckerberg was worthy of the title.

It hasn't entirely been a banner year for Facebook, however. The company's privacy and advertising policies have sent users reaching for their torches and pitchforks on more than one occasion, and questions still remain as to exactly how the company plans to balance out its need to turn a profit with its duty to protect user information.

In claiming the title, Zuckerberg joins a rather surprising list of technology figures who have been named person of the year. A list as notable for who is not on it as who is, the POTY ranks include Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Andy Grove of Intel, but not Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison. In 1982, the computer was given the honor, and in 2006 web users were awarded the title.

So, now that Zuckerberg has won his POTY award, who among the technology community could be next? Steve Jobs is always a strong candidate due to his high profile and Apple's continued success. Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are also candidates given the meteoric rise of that company. There are also a few longshots, such as Google's Eric Schmidt and Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff who could make the list should their respective cloud computing platforms go mainstream and take over the enterprise market.

The most likely candidate, however, may not be a person at all, but a platform. All the talk in recent years has been around cloud computing, and with the accelerated growth of web-based platforms, we may be looking at 2011 as "the year of the cloud".

Mark Zuckerberg gives precious few interviews, but conducts even fewer. Today he conducted a live one however, with former president George W Bush.

It was a very genial affair, held at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto. Bush said it was very gratifying to have 600,000 followers on Facebook and was perfectly blunt in saying the reason he wanted to do the interview was to push his new book 'Decision Points.'

He sprawled across a beige seat and spent much of the talk teasing Zuckerberg about his lack of a college degree. He said he had changed from being a BlackBerry person to an iPad person, but no longer listened to his iPod when out and about as he liked to hear the birds singing.

A visibly nervous Zuckerberg was hardly asking tough questions ("You're no Jay Leno," the ex-president joked) and said that he admired the president for sticking to his guns and not changing unpopular opinions. He also praised Bush for staying out of the criticisms of the current president by his party.

Bush answered a variety of questions on topics ranging from his childhood, dealing with criticism and his legacy, but reserved most of his more controversial segment for discussing the latest WikiLeaks revelations, calling for those responsible to be prosecuted.

As to his legacy Bush said he wasn't concerned, and was content with his life. The book was just a chance to give his side of the story he said.

As Oscar Wilde put it the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. Mark Zuckerberg has either made the last week an opportunity or an exercise in hubris.

As most of the Western world seems to be aware there's a new film, written by the excellent Aaron Sorokin of West Wing fame, has been released showing one side of the creation of Facebook.

In response Zuckerberg has been on a PR offensive. He's given $100m to fund school classes in technology and community, appeared on the Simpsons last weekend (although to be fair the run up for that honour is pretty long and has posted online that he likes the film.

On Saturday Night Live Zuckerberg was parodied by comedian Andy Samberg.

"What does it matter? It was $100 million," his character said. Zuckerberg laughed it off in a Facebook posting.

All this looks like a masterfully executed spin campaign about the movie. Zuckerberg has never made a secret of his dislike for the book that spawned The Social Network and refused to co-operate in its writing. Sleuth finds this perfectly understandable.

But Zuckerberg's next actions need to be watched closely. Do will have another philanthropist on a par with Bill Gates, or will we see Zuckerberg join Peter Thiel on the dark side?