Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was named Time magazine's "Person of the Year" on Wednesday for "creating a new system of exchanging information and changing how we all live our lives."

The 26-year-old founder of the social networking site has helped people connect with one other and has changed definitions of privacy, Time managing editor Richard Stengel said in a letter on the magazine's website.

"There is an erosion of trust in authority, a decentralising of power and at the same time, perhaps, a greater faith in one another," Stengel said. "More than anyone else on the world stage, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is at the centre of those changes."

"He's just getting started. What looks like a meteoric rise to the rest of us, he sees as an opening act. Because now that Facebook has scaled up to a species-level event, the real work can start: taking a 550 million-person network out on the highway and seeing what it can do," the US news and current affairs monthly said about Zuckerberg.