A Facebook status update could be up to 420 characters long in March 2009, 500 characters in July 2011, and 5,000 characters in September 2011.
But now? Now you can post status updates that are over 60,000 characters long, according to Facebook's Journalist Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik. In case you're wondering how far over 60,000 you can go: The character limit is set at 63,206.
How'd Facebook come up with this ridiculously large, and unusual, character limit? Bob Baldwin, the software engineer who set the new number, explains:
Don't worry if that flies over your head — geeky calculations tend to require several cups of coffee and a bit of homework for most of us.
What you really should know is that this change means that you could theoretically post an entire novel in fewer than nine Facebook updates. (Assuming that the average novel is about 500,000 characters long.) Alternatively, you could squeeze over 450 tweets, about 395 text messages, or one incredibly long rant into a single new text space.
No guarantees that your friends will read it though.
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