TIME Magazine has announced its 2010 Person of the Year, and it’s the same guy who starred in one of the year’s biggest films — sort of. Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old Facebook creator and subject of Oscar front-runner ‘The Social Network,’ notched the honor “for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives,” TIME writes.

Zuckerberg beat Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for the top spot.

Zuckerberg became the world’s youngest billionaire at age 23. Facebook has more than 500 million users today.

David Fincher’s ‘The Social Network,’ dramatizing the inception of Facebook with Jesse Eisenberg portraying Zuckerberg as an antisocial, almost sociopathic programming whiz, has been notching many honors on the road to Academy Awards season. The film accepted Best Picture honors from the National Board of Review, the New York Film Festival and various critics’ groups and just earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture (Drama).

Watch TIME’s video interview with Zuckerberg here

Tags: David Fincher, Jesse Eisenberg, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Social Network, Wikileaks