Most of the stuff FaceBook did to change the world happened around 2007. Heck, the fact that the movie's coming out now indicates that the important stuff happened long ago.

I have to wonder - Assange has only received serious press attention for the last few weeks. Isn't this just a case of him being more fresh in our minds?

Asked another way, looking back 3 years from now, who will most people has made a bigger impact on the world?

This is about this year IMO. Also think about masses, people from afghanistan and pakistan who don't know/care about FB knows about Assagne thanks to he being given high coverage in world media.

edit: Changed name because apparently I get modded down for referring to Mr Assange as "Rapey McRapeHair"

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64J2I920100520

Caption: "Supporters of Islamic political party Jamaat-e-Islami protest in Peshawar against an online competition to draw pictures of Prophet Mohammad on Facebook which Muslims deem blasphemous May 20, 2010"

The actual nature of wikileaks's leaks has turned out to be so prosaic that it hasn't really changed anything. Apparently diplomats bitch about things. Whoop de fricking doo.

edit: Wait, I forgot about the Kenya thing, of which Assange claims "1,300 people were eventually killed, and 350,000 were displaced. That was a result of our leak."

I'd only leak to wikileaks if I (for some reason) wanted to leak ten gigabytes of randomly selected secret documents of no particular consequence. Wikileaks is the open mic night of leaking -- it's where you find the random crap, not the big stories.

They would refuse to leak random diplomatic cables which don't show any wrongdoing by anybody, though. (Although they're quite happy to publish a story about them if someone else is responsible for the leaking.)

If I were the wikimedia foundation I'd be complaining about that.

edit: And on the point of accuracy... it would be an interesting prank to leak some fake documents to Wikileaks and see if you can get 'em to make a big fanfare about them. Preferably you'd fake enough documents so that they wouldn't really check them, and it would be several days into the media cycle before folks started to notice that some of the most incriminating memos were sent between parties such as "I. P. Freely" and "Amanda Hugnkiss".

It's interesting that you think that they aren't already constantly being bombarded with false information via intelligence agencies as a tactic to discredit them.

is an annoying rhetorical tactic. Instead of explicitly suggesting P, which might require you to support the proposition P, you instead sneer at the possibility that someone might think not-P.

Actually in this case my main reason for believing not P is that they haven't been successfully trolled yet. If an intelligence agency did attempt this trick then they'd almost certainly succeed, because the Wikileaks crew are mere mortals and quite capable of being fooled by a clever fake.

If any intelligence agencies are reading this, though, and feel like offering me a job in the wikileaks-trolling department I'd be happy to accept it.

So are the intelligence agencies.

Mostly because Bob needs a 100% success rate while Alice wins with any success rate below 100%.

Oh, one more thing: Assange likes to whine every time he thinks someone is after him. If they'd picked up a bunch of fake CIA-planted information being submitted then they'd be talking about it, wouldn't they?

You wouldn't leak to The New York Times because they have no secure mechanism of any kind for leaking.

WikiLeaks is not just a two-bit news outlet looking for stories. They continue to maintain one of the most innovative and secure systems in the world for leaking sensitive materials.

Assange has repeatedly let his SSL certificates and PGP keys expire, had has had a series of completely insecure submission systems that have been disabled most of the time since he started whoring for donations a couple years ago.

I'd definitely say that will have a much bigger impact. Besides what has Zuckerbeg doen this year that he hasn't done a year before?

Wikileaks's main innovation is publishing leaks of stuff that don't matter.

I wonder how Wikileaks would make politician honest. I correlate honest with lies. What Wikileaks exposed are not lies, they are secret data/info.

I think, though, that Julian's basically validated the idea that a.) it's possible to collect, vet, and release potentially damaging information about powerful entities and b.) people care when you do. We've had time periods like this in the past (eg. the Muckraker era at the turn of the 1900s, the Pentagon Papers from the early 70s, Watergate), but the last such era seems to have been over 30 years ago. In the last 10+ years, we seem to have accepted the idea that it's okay for government and corporations to spy on us, but not okay for us to spy on them.

Julian was just the guy who had the balls to say "Umm, two can play at this game" and follow through on it. He's validated the market. It's like Napster and Friendster: the services themselves failed, but they paved the way for iTunes and FaceBook, which have become huge.

Can you imagine what'll happen when some enterprising anarchist hacker hooks up spyware, a botnet, and a spam network? It's not terribly difficult to write malware that scans each infected computer for any documents and posts them as spam comments to blogs or sends them out as spam emails. The thing is - once the information is out there, it naturally gets collaboratively-filtered. The interesting tidbits will be forwarded on or posted to Reddit, while the boring stuff will be deleted as garden-variety spam.

I suspect that there's already malware out there that does exactly this, but instead of posting confidential info to random blogs, it just uplinks it to the Chinese government or some Russian mafia syndicate.

The impact of WikiLeaks is that it's turned a spotlight on the damage that can be done - and more important, the attention that can be gained - by leaking information. That makes it far more likely that some bright, naughty teenager is going to think "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if everything was out there?" and dump everything out there.

Also, given the criteria where is Osama Bin Laden? His actions have done more to change the everyday world for people in the US than any other person in the last decade.

I wonder if certain people and agencies had a hand in this?

[1] it does - I know - just not as much as certainly other things do

Most people would admit that Facebook is a pretty interesting phenomenon. That a few hundred million people are at least shallowly engaging with people they haven't seen in years is pretty remarkable. But where I disagree with Time is that I don't think Zuckerberg was a particularly necessary ingredient. Facebook hit the scene as basically a cleaner, better designed MySpace. Zuckerberg's execution was spot on, but frankly, a lot of people could have done it. A large part of Facebook's success was being at the right place at the right time. And once the network effect kicked in, it pretty much drives itself.

Assange on the other hand has put his ass on the line and managed to embarrass and disgruntle some of the most powerful players on the planet - ostensibly in the name of transparency. The implications of his actions are that world super powers are having to reconsider many of their assumptions about diplomacy and security, and that the world's citizenry are having to ponder the value and risks of free speech. Or at least they should be...

Mark I suspect isn't nearly as good a programmer as the press (or his company PR) makes him out to be. Early versions of the site were a simple PHP index app. Only now once they've hired significant talent has he started harping on and on about the "social graph". Simply put I don't think he was up to the level to even do graph traversals/searches/etc at that point.

If Mark had tried to do the graph stuff first, would he be just another corpse littering the landscape? I suspect so. So his incompetence was his lucky pot of gold.

However, I'd disagree with placing Deng Xiaoping in the same list as Hitler and Stalin. He's arguably the architect of modern China, and such a towering positive achievement is only mildly dented by his responsibility for the Tiananmen massacre (IMO).