Time 100 Most Influential People

Time, May 8 issue is one that couldn't be missed. It's a special issue on the world's 100 most influential people and also Time's largest issue since they named Albert Einstein their Person of the Century six years ago. Looking at the names listed, definitely it could have raised a few eyebrows.

Anyway, it's interesting to note that under the ranks of Builders & Titans, three netpreneurs made it into the list. These are the ones that really caught my attention. First the Flickr (web photosharing site) founder - Caterina Fake and husband, Stewart Butterfield. Flickr was created in February 2004 and just after 16 month later, Yahoo! bought it for nearly $30 million! Wow. Simply amazing isn't it. I'm thinking of changing my photoblog from fotopages to Flickr now, as they got much better web tools like the hot tags and loads much faster compared to fotopages (am i right?), but i guess i'll just stick to fotopages.com for the time being. heh.

Next is the Myspace.com dudes, Chris Dewolfe and Tom Anderson. Here's two amazing facts from Time magazine about them. Myspace is currently the seventh most popular website in the world, according to web traffic tracker, Alexa.com! And i guess the most unbelievable fact was that, Australian-born media tycoon, Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace and its parent company for $580 million!! gile sial.

Third, the Skype Guys. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Exerpts from Time;

"They are part of the VOIP (voice-over-internet-protocol) movement that is redefining the way telephone calls are made. VOIP calls are made over the internet, using the same underlying transport technology that a web browser uses.."

These two Swedish guys were also the creator of the file-sharing application, Kazaa, back in 2001. Their story is just about the same like the previous two above. Last year, they sold Skype to eBay for $2.6 billion! Omg, 2.6 billion! phew.

It's always wonderful and refreshing to read stories about successful people. It makes you feel so inspired. And of course there's also people like George Bush, Al Gore, Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Palestinian PM, Ismail Haniya and Al-Qaeda's most wanted man- Ayman Al-Zawahiri making into the top 100 list.

Here's another quite similar alternative to the Time 100, 'The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History', a book by Michael H. Hart. It is important to note that Hart's criterion was influence and not the ranking of the greatest. One of the most significant part on Hart's list was that, Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) was ranked at number one. Quite surprisingly though, perhaps the fact that it was published by a western author.