Zuckberberg was chosen "for connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them ... and for changing how we all live our lives."

But was Assange robbed?

The photo TIME picked for Zuckerberg is the first thing we noticed in reviewing the article, now posted online at TIME.com. Those eyes! That creepy stare! It seems that the photo may end up being as controversial as the winner itself. TIME obviously wanted to imply something about Facebook's privacy issues by choosing a photo where the young CEO seems to gaze right into your soul, as if he knew all your deepest, darkest secrets.

Facebook's Privacy Issues Dominated Half the Year

But the photo may be an appropriate choice, given the context. Facebook had a tough year when it came to privacy, thanks to a long-running privacy debacle that began in late December/early January, where a host of forced, opt-out (not in) changes were switched on, affecting all user photos, videos, links and even status updates. Automatically, seemingly overnight, those items went from being privately shared to becoming public, unless you, as a user, manually switched them back to private.

Millions, of course, didn't, either not knowing or not caring about the impact of that choice. We would argue that it's the former, given the embarrassments published daily to youropenbook.org, a Facebook public search tool that reminds you how "Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Whether you want to or not."

And with Facebook's launch of Instant Personalization, a feature that let Facebook partners immediately tap into user profile data to customize websites to your needs, Facebook even came under scrutiny from federal regulators in the U.S. April. E.U. regulators weren't happy either.

By May, the debate reached a boiling point, leading Facebook's CEO to address the issue via press conference. At the event, Zuckerberg announced that the changes would be rolled back, would retroactively apply to all content and the company would introduce new, simpler privacy controls.

By doing so, Facebook seemed to have squelch the debate itself for now, but the damage to the company's reputation was done. The world was clued into Facebook's agenda at last. Simply put the agenda is: openness, openness and more openness.

2010: The Year of Openness

Another man who would argue for openness is Wikileaks' Juilan Assange. As TIME's managing editor Rick Stengel explained in an editor's note:

"Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin. Both express a desire for openness and transparency. While Assange attacks big institutions and governments through involuntary transparency with the goal of disempowering them, Zuckerberg enables individuals to voluntarily share information with the idea of empowering them. Assange sees the world as filled with real and imagined enemies; Zuckerberg sees the world as filled with potential friends. Both have a certain disdain for privacy: in Assange's case because he feels it allows malevolence to flourish; in Zuckerberg's case because he sees it as a cultural anachronism, an impediment to a more efficient and open connection between people."

Assange Was Robbed!, Cry Journos

But who had more impact on the world this year? Assange with his political disruption? Or the CEO of a social networking site?

Several notable journalists disagree with TIME's decision and Michael Calderone rounded up a few of the more memorable comments, here on Yahoo's The Cutline blog:

• "The will of the people is fulfilled," wrote the New York Times' Dave Itzkoff. "Wait, no it isn't."
• "Once again Time editors demonstrate POTY no longer for the person who had the greatest impact on the year," wrote ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper, asking if "Jersey Shore" star Snooki will get the nod next year.
• Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg said that it was "gutless of Time not to name Assange."
• "Hmmm, in 25 years, will this make sense?" asked NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd.
• Alexi Mostrous, a Times of London reporter covering WikiLeaks, said that Time must consider Assange "too controversial" because WikiLeaks "certainly had greater impact than Facebook this year."

What do you think? Was Assange robbed? Or does Zuckberberg deserve the accolade?

The press conference is scheduled to start around 10:30am PT (1:30pm ET).

When we asked a Facebook spokesman about the meeting we got the same boilerplate as every other organization.

We have an open culture and it should come as no surprise that we're providing a forum for employees to ask questions on a topic that has received a lot of outside interest.

In an e-mailed statement to Computerworld, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said, "We had a productive discussion where comments were made and questions were asked and answered."

Noyes declined, however, to say if the social networking giant made any decisions about changing its contentious privacy policies or if the meeting was simply to allow employees to ask questions about the brouhaha that has arisen over them.

The notion of an open culture as the PR trope from Facebook just seems silly at this point. The company will not issue any substantial comments about a meeting that was called in response to the poor reception to its recent changes. These included objections to what some have seen as underhanded changes and poor communication.

Read on to find our live blog of Mark Zuckerberg's keynote. The keynote is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PST (GMT -7:00).

Watch it Live

You can also find live video of the keynote here.

We will refresh this page regularly during the keynote. Please reload this page to see these updates.

9:45: Audience is getting seated.

10:01: Looks like there is a little delay. Keynote is now scheduled to start at 10:10 a.m. PST.

10:07: Rumor: Facebook and Microsoft will announce a new application partnership.

Image credit: Devin Reams.

10:11: Zuckerberg on stage.

10:12: "What we have to show you today will be one of the most transformative things for the Web we've ever done."

Open Graph: Puts people at the center of the Web. "The Web can become a semantically meaningful set of connections."

10:14: Recap of Facebook stats: 400 million users on Facebook, 100 million people use Facebook Connect.

"A lot of startups are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences."

Policy updates: All permissions are now managed in one permissions dialog.

Cache: Developers can now store information for longer than 24 hours.

10:18: Facebook credits: More than 100 developers working with Facebook already.

10:18: Back to Open Graph: "Facebook only maps out the part of the social graph that relates to people." Others, like Yelp and Pandora map out the social graph around other topics.

10:21: There is no way to bring these different graphs together yet. Right now, developers use the stream metaphor, but the services don't understand these connections.

10:22: By connecting these graphs, Facebook will be able to show you restaurants your friends like, music your friends like, etc. "By doing this, the Web will get a whole lot better."

10:23: New Graph API: Makes it simple to read connections on FB. Based on a new standard.

New plugins for sites: Make your sites instantly social and personalized.

10:24: Example: See what your friends already liked on CNN. CNN won't know who you are or who your friends are.

On CNN homepage: See all your friends' activity.

10:25: Bret Taylor (formerly of Friendfeed) on stage.

10:27: How do you get people to feel comfortable with importing their Facebook friends?

Experience from Friendfeed: The only signup button that mattered was Facebook Connect, because that was the best way for people to find their friends.

10:28: New products: Social plugins: add social features with just one line of HTML.

Universal like button: A like button for the Web that will instantly share your like back to FB. Based on an iframe.

10:31: Activity streams plugin: Transport the FB news feed to your site.

10:31: Recommendations plugin: Show users articles on your site that they are most likely to like. Highly personalized.

Login plugin: See which of your friends already signed up for a given service.

Social bar: The "kitchen sink" of Facebook's new plugins. One bar at the bottom of the site will show all of these features.

10:33: Talking about the news feed: Open Graph will make the stream more useful. Allows you to markup your pages to tell Facebook what kind of real-world object your page represents. You can say, for example, that a page is about a band and where this band is from.

New section on your profile can now show which movies, songs, etc. you liked.

10:36: Launching with 30 partners today.

You can also subscribe by topics.

These likes and updates will point to sites outside of Facebook. "My identity is not just defined by Facebook but also by all of the things I do around the Web."

10:38: Graph API: Our attempt to re-architect the Facebook platform with simplicity and the Graph API in mind.

10:40: You can download all of the connections of a given user from the Graph API.

10:41: Search: You can search through all of the public updates on Facebook.

Real-time will be built-in. Facebook will ping developers when a user posts an update.

10:42: Facebook will use oAuth 2.0. "It's so much more awesome than our current system. Available for the Graph API and all of Facebook's existing APIs.

10:44: Zuckerberg back on stage.

Facebook expects to service a total of 1 billion like buttons today.

10:45: "The Web is at an important turning point today." Startups require their users to bring their real identity. "The default is now social."

10:46: What kind of products would be possible if Facebook partners already knew everything about their users?

Microsoft Docs.com: Online version of Microsoft's office suite. Collaborate with friends on documents.

All of the power of Microsoft Office - but with a built-in social experience.

Second example: Pandora. See what bands your friends like on Pandora.

10:50: Zuckerberg finishes the keynote with an anecdote about his girlfriend.

"For those wondering," he wrote this afternoon, "I set most of my content on my personal Facebook page to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)" Hopefully he'll remember that not everyone feels the same way about privacy.

Zuckerberg has both a personal profile and a Facebook page on the site. Most of his photos are on his personal profile.

As of this week, Facebook users are no longer able to make their profile photos, home towns and friends lists viewable only by approved friends. Those are all public now. Posted content, like status messages and photos, are for the first time "recommended" as a new default setting to be public - for any users who hadn't edited their privacy settings before. The company told us last night that only 15 to 20% of Facebook users had changed their settings before.

Of course if you're a person who wants to show your status messages and photos only to approved friends, you can opt-out of the new settings at any time. And if there are specific people you don't want to see those things, you can easily block them as individuals.

But after years of saying that Facebook data is private between friends because that's what makes people comfortable enough to share - this is a radical change. Zuckerberg used to post his photos privately, what made him change his comfort level? (And how do the people in those pictures with him feel?)

It's a good thing you've got that teddy bear to squeeze, Mark. These changes are likely to get pretty rocky. Especially given that you're probably not going to stop suggesting that people open up publicly after this campaign alone.

While there remains an ongoing debate about how overbearing the terms legally were, Facebook has decided to revert back to its previous terms, according to a post by Mark Zuckerberg:

"A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised."

Who's right? Who's wrong? Who knows? One thing is for sure: we'll be keeping an eye on the Facebook Bill of Rights and Terms of Use page for the next chapter in this ongoing saga.