Zuckerberg named Time's Person of the Year

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".