The Facebook Blog

Originally published on Wednesday, August 18, 2010

If you're like me, when you find a place you really like, you want to tell your friends you're there. Maybe it's a new restaurant, a beautiful hiking trail or an amazing live show.

Starting today, you can immediately tell people about that favorite spot with Facebook Places. You can share where you are and the friends you're with in real time from your mobile device.

Checking In with Friends

Ever gone to a show, only to find out afterward that your friends were there too? With Places, you can discover moments when you and your friends are at the same place at the same time.

You have the option to share your location by "checking in" to that place and letting friends know where you are. You can easily see if any of your friends have also chosen to check in nearby.

To get started, you'll need the most recent version of the Facebook application for iPhone. You also can access Places from touch.facebook.com if your mobile browser supports HTML 5 and geolocation.

Go to Places on the iPhone application or touch.facebook.com site and then tap the "Check In" button. You'll see a list of places near you. Choose the place that matches where you are. If it's not on the list, search for it or add it. After checking in, your check-in will create a story in your friends' News Feeds and show up in the Recent Activity section on the page for that place.

Places is only available in the United States right now. But we expect to make it available to more countries and on additional mobile platforms soon.

Who's with Me?

When you check in, you can also tag friends who are with you, just as you can tag a friend in a status update or photo. You can post an update along with your check-in to tell people more about what you are doing.

In the "People Here Now" section, you can see others who are checked in with you at that place. This section is visible for a limited amount of time and only to people who are checked in there. That way you can meet other people who might share your interests. If you prefer not to appear in this section, you can control whether you show up by unchecking the "Include me in 'People Here Now' after I check in" privacy control.

The next time you head off on vacation or go to a show, check in with Places to find out which friends are there. See who is close by and read the comments from other friends who've been there before.

Tagging and Control

With Places, you are in control of what you share and the people you share with. You choose whether or not to share your location when you check in at a place. When you check in, you can tag friends who are with you but only if their settings allow it. When you are tagged, you are always notified.

Only your friends can see when you visit or are tagged at a place, unless you have specifically set your master privacy control to "Everyone." You also have the choice to set more restrictive customized settings.

When a friend tags you through Places, you will receive a notification on Facebook and on your mobile device. The first time this happens, you'll be given the choice to allow your friends to check you in to places.

When your friends check you in, it is as if you have checked in at that place yourself. You also will appear checked-in to your friends. If you do not allow friends to check you in, then when they tag you at a place, your name will appear in the same way it appears in a tagged status update. You will not appear checked-in at that place.

You can always remove any Places check-in or tag using your mobile device or on the web. It's like removing yourself from a photo tag. You also have the choice to turn off the ability for friends to check you in at Places. Go to your Privacy Settings and turn off the setting to "Let Friends Check Me In."

You may want to share your check-in information with third-party applications that build interesting experiences around location, such as travel planning. Applications you use must receive your permission before getting this information. Your friends will be able to share your check-ins with the applications they use to help create new social experiences with location. If you don't want to share your check-ins with your friends' applications, just uncheck the new box in your Privacy Settings under "Applications and Websites."

Everything happens somewhere. Start exploring your world with your friends by sharing your experiences at the places where you go. Take a tour of Places to learn more. Please share your feedback with us here.

Michael Sharon, Facebook product manager for Places, is checking in to Facebook HQ.

The good news: We've already made progress, and we're taking some more big steps in the coming weeks. For example, in the past couple of weeks, we've already made Chat faster and more stable, fixed bugs and improved the technology on which it runs.

Since its launch two years ago, Chat has grown from a small feature into one of the most widely used tools on Facebook. People around the world use it to share quick updates with people nearby and to stay in touch over long distances with friends and loved ones. And the more that people chat, the more we need to do to keep the application running smoothly.

We know you want Chat to be hassle-free and uninterrupted. In the coming weeks, we will be making important improvements in the way connections are established and messages are sent, so that Chat will be much more stable for you and your friends.

The biggest improvements come from changes that aren't supported on older web browsers. After evaluating the alternatives, we've decided to make rapid improvements and provide the best Chat experience possible, which means we will no longer support Internet Explorer 6 browsers.

To give people time to update their browsers, we plan to make this change on Sept. 15. If you're using Internet Explorer 6, you can learn more about downloading a newer version here.

With these improvements to Chat, we hope you'll be able to stay even more connected to the people you care about. Let us know how we're doing. Please share feedback about chat here.

Rodrigo, a Facebook software engineer on the Chat team, uses Facebook Chat to stay in touch with his family in Brazil and friends in Europe.

We're changing all of that so it's quicker and easier to create and find your notes and the notes from the people around you. We've rolled out a new layout and features for Facebook Notes. Now you can:

• Format notes more easily with a familiar text editor. Stop looking up HTML for common formatting like bold, italics, bulleted and numbered lists, or indented quotes. Instead just click the formatting icons as you write a note.

• Tag that special non-profit you believe in or that musician you're raving about in a note. We've added tagging of Facebook Pages—such as celebrities, interests and activities. As with tags of friends, tags of Pages will appear in a box on the note's page. When viewing Notes from a Facebook Page, you can browse notes in which that Page has been tagged by one of your friends or by people who shared their note with "everyone."

• Find more relevant notes through a cleaner layout. A common left-hand menu includes links to your note, notes about yourself, your drafts and easy ways to find notes about friends and Pages.

Are there other changes you'd like to see? Let us know.

Michael Novati, a Facebook software engineer, likes writing notes about Notes.

This new photo browsing experience is one of a series of improvements we're making to browsing, uploading and tagging photos. We've already increased the size of photos. We've also added face detection to make it easier to tag photos on your home page and throughout the site.

Before this latest change, photo albums would display 20 photos per page. Now instead of waiting for pages to load, you're enjoying more photos of your friends and family. You can see as many as 200 right away in an album.

Don't worry—this won't slow down the browser. We populate the page with more photos as you scroll down. That's similar to how News Feed displays more stories as you navigate down the page.

The thumbnails displayed are also larger, so now you can see more before deciding whether to click to a full-sized image.

Have feedback for Facebook Photos? Share it with us at www.facebook.com/photosfeedback.

Stefan, a User Interface Engineer, is immersing himself in Facebook photo albums.

• Select who can see the content you post by setting the simple control for sharing on Facebook to friends, friends of friends or everyone,


• Fully customize your granular settings, if you want, and have them take effect instantly, and


• Read through our comprehensive privacy guide, formatted for mobile devices.

Privacy controls on m.facebook.com