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Facebook Boosts Character Limit to Over 60,000
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You now have more of an opportunity to overshare on Facebook—more than 60,000 characters.
"In September, we increased the character limit on status updates to 5,000 characters," Vadim Lavrusik, journalist program manager at Facebook, wrote on the site. "Today, we're announcing that you can now write posts with more than 60,000 characters."
The actual character limit is 63,206. Software engineer Bob Baldwin, who made the change, said he selected that number for "nerdy" reasons.
"Facebook ... Face Boo K ... hex(FACE) - K ... 64206 - 1000 = 63206 :-)" Baldwin wrote.
In a graphic (below) posted on Facebook, the company said the average novel has about 500,000 characters, so users could conceivably share a full book in about nine posts.
In the early days, Facebook had a Twitter-esque character limit of 160, but that grew to 420 in March 2009. By July 2011, the social network boosted character limits to 500, raising that again to 5,000 two months later.
There are probably those who could fill 60,000 characters with random musings about their day, what they had for dinner, and thoughts on the world, but would anyone want to read it? The move comes almost three months after Facebook added a "subscribe" option, which lets users subscribe to, or follow, people and read their public posts. Will lengthier posts now fill your news feed? Stay tuned.
Twitter, of course, was built around the short, 140-character bursts of information. The limit on Google+ appears to be 100,000, according to ZDNet.
For more from Chloe, follow her on Twitter @ChloeAlbanesius.
Originally published on pcmag.com. Click here to read the original story.
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