Time's 100 Most Influential People Includes 4chan And Twitter Creators

twitter_guysThis list is in. Time has released its annual Time 100 list, honoring the most influential people in the world. There are a lot of interesting names including Sarah Palin and President Obama, but let’s focus on the names from the tech sphere.

Moot (the creator of 4chan), Jeff Bezos, The Twitter Guys, Sam & Dan Houser, Jack Ma, Robin Chase, Nathaniel Silver, Nandan Nilekani, and Shai Agassi have all been included. And some of their write-ups are really interesting because of their authors. For example, Moot is written up by the man perhaps now best known for being the “Rick” in the “Rick Roll”, Rick Astley. The “Twitter Guys” (founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey) are written up by Ashton Kutcher, the first Twitter user with a million followers. And Jeff Bezos is written up by Bill Gates.

Here’s a line from the Twitter story that will no doubt infuriate those that hate Twitter:

Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

In his profile of Moot, Astley admits that at first he was a bit embarrassed by the phenomenon of Rick Rolling, but then embraced it. Oddly, he spends almost the entire article talking about himself. He also uses the word “bonkers.” 4chan dominated the online voting portion for the Time 100 list, to win it easily and his followers even manipulated the 20 runners-up to make a joke. But Time kept its promise to honor the winner.

[photo: Robyn Twomey for TIME]