Zuckerberg, Huffington and Bieber — The online influencers

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Larry Page and Wikileaks’ infamous editor Julian Assange are among the online personalties to grace this year’s Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The yearly list was released on Thursday Time.

This year’s list includes a number of people who are making their mark online as well people who have used technology to rocket into the spotlight. Notable examples include Newark Mayor Cory Booker who made excellent use of Twitter during the New York/New Jersey snow storms of 2010. And there is of course the reigning prince of social media, Justin Bieber — the teen popstar has legions of followers online retweeting, sharing his videos and every thought.

The use of social media in the Middle East revolts saw key Egyptian revolution figure Wael Ghonim and Al-Jazeera journalist Ayman Mohyeldin — who tweeted the entire jasmine
revolution whilst also reporting it on the scene — join the ranks of influencers.

Zuckerberg’s appearance on the list is no surprise given he was named Time’s person of the year in 2010, a title some thought would go Assange. Page’s return to Google’s helm has made him all the more important. Writing about Page, his Stanford graduate advisor expects him “always to be a bit quirky, to raise hackles and to pursue things that seem unreasonable and unreachable — until the very moment they become a reality”.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made the list as well as Huffington Post’s founder and editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington, Angry Birds creator Peter Vesterbacka and Charles Chao, developer of China’s popular microblogging platform — Sina Weibo.

You can go to the full list to see who else made it this year, some of the usual suspects linger.