The main factor attributed to the success of the social network Facebook is that it has a very big market. Nowadays not only are young people in to using Facebook to connect with friends, family, and colleagues, older people are doing the same thing.

Moreover, Facebook was used mainly by college students who think the privacy policies of it are sufficient. This led to college students being more attracted to sign up for Facebook where they are able to interact with one another.

Facebook allows people, particularly those in college, to connect with each other which led to the idea that it was for the privileged people. This is in connection to Ivy League students who were the first people to ever use Facebook.

What makes Facebook different from Friendster is that it is faster to use. People do realize that they need a social network that is not slow.

A new development of Facebook is its new feature that allow people in the United States to share with each other their whereabouts while they are at it. It is called Facebook Places. It makes it easy for people to catch up with one another. It also makes it easy to tell people your favorite places are when using this kind of application. It allows people to know that places you just visited in real time as well.

Restaurants, bars, malls can now be checked-in by people to make it known by their contacts their whereabouts in real time through one's mobile device. If your friends have been to the place where you are now, you can get to know what they thought of it when they were there before.

The application for Iphone has been recently released making it possible for this application to be used by many people who have an Iphone.

What about the people who are not living in the United States? Well, they are able to see where their friends from the US go to but they will not be allowed to check-in to places. This was said by the founder Mark Zuckerberg at the event where the application was launched in the headquarters of the firm in Northern California. But fear not, one of the plans of Facebook is to make this application to other countries since Facebook has over 500 million users worldwide.

Facebook is also being careful with the privacy aspect of this applications. They made sure that information sent can be viewed depending on the preferences of the person. A few months ago, people protested against the lack of privacy of Facebook saying that it failed to give them enough privacy. Facebook Places will surely precipitate more debates about the privacy of Facebook users.

In order for people to not be dismayed about their privacy with regard to Places, users would have to grant permission to the application before it posts their whereabouts as stated by Facebook engineer Ben Gertzfield.

The three main aims of Facebook places is to help people know which of their friends are nearby. It also allows the social way of telling people where you are in real time. The discovery of new places is also made possible by this application. This helps people connect both their offline and online worlds.

By using Facebook Places, you can even tag friends who are with you in a same location. This makes the sharing even more remarkable since not everyone has a smartphone that you can use to access Facebook Places. The first time you will be tagged by a friend in a certain place, you will be given the option if you will allow your friends to tag you in places. Furthermore, you can remove tags of yourself in places by your friends.

Several other companies were also invited during the launching of Facebook Places. These include Scott Raymond who is the CEO of Gowalla, Vice President of mobile and partnerships of Foursquare, Holger Luedorf.

It was also said by this people that the future looks promising for this kind of application and they are keen on working with the Facebook group to develop the application.

With so many improvements and developments taking place in Facebook, it will be really good for the company and people. Facebook allows people to connect with each other in so many different ways that its success is just so evident. Facebook places will probably account for much of the success that Facebook has. Also, due to the changing times, people can expect more developments from Facebook. Who knows what the future holds anyway? Tomorrow we might be able to experience more due to the advancements of technology. Places is just one of the few things Facebook is able to do now and the future looks very bright not only for the company but to people and the future generation as well.