Quantcast Taking spam to a whole new level – Your New Facebook Status: 63,206 Characters or Less ← BLOG404

Taking spam to a whole new level – Your New Facebook Status: 63,206 Characters or Less 4

See 140 written somewhere and it reminds you of twitter popularizing the new 140 keep it short trend . Google Plus appears to have a limit of 100,000 characters the day it went live .And now Facebook is in the league of social networks offering huge character limits by raising theirs to a whacking 63,206 ! This is the most recent update from Facebook during early november so that users can “utilise to express themselves” .


That’s more than a 12-fold increase over the last limit of 5,000 characters. And it’s no surprise because Facebook’s status limitations have been repeatedly increased with the longstanding 500 character cap being stacked to 5,000 in March of this year.

The evolution of Facebook’s character count limits is overwhelming .

  • 160 characters (similar to Twitter’s 140 characters) was the limit in Facebook’s early days.
  • 420 characters (March 2009)
  • 500 characters (July 2011)
  • 5,000 characters (Sept 2011)
  • 63,206 characters (Nov 2011)

Interested in writing and wanna be an awesome writer ? No problem !  Just write a story in the status on Facebook and in this way you can publish your own book 😛  As its 63,206 character which is  1 / 3 “A Christmas Carol” Charles Dickens. This much of content can be found in one post.

  • If you enter characters more than the limit, it will give you an error message with the title “Status Update Too Long.”
  • It reads as follows: “Status updates must be less than 63,206 characters. You have entered x characters here. Notes can be much longer. Would you like to edit and post your update as a Note instead?
  • You are then given two options: Cancel and Edit As Note.
  • “You can now write posts with more than 60,000 characters, including status, group and wall posts,” an official statement from Facebook read on the decision.

“For reference, a novel has roughly 500,000 characters. This could be shared in nine posts.”

Whilst Facebook has yet to officially confirm the reasoning behind the rather precise 63,206 character cap, the increase sees the world’s largest social network still fall short of the recently launched Google+ and its 100,000 character limit.

I honestly don’t see why anyone would ever want to write such a long status update [with the exception of spammers].

So where does the number 63,206 come from? Facebook engineer Bob Baldwin explains:
“I set the exact limit to something nerdy. Facebook … Face Boo K … hex(FACE) – K … 64206 – 1000 = 63206 :-).”

 

What-A-Nerd !
The change to a 63,206-character status update makes Facebook more competitive against google plus however takes it further away from the 140-character limit that Twitter is so famous for. This also means Facebook would take SPAM to a whole new level 😀 and become more of a faceBOOK

Would you ever post a message this long? Let us know in the comments. But please, if you can, keep it short 😉

4 thoughts on “Taking spam to a whole new level – Your New Facebook Status: 63,206 Characters or Less

  1. Reply jim syyap Dec 3,2011 12:32 pm

    Where do you get these stuff? Thank you for sharing!

  2. Reply Salman @ Tech Blog Dec 3,2011 11:12 pm

    Great share ….

    Like you even I wont see anyone writing a such long status (with the same exception :P) Liked the explanation from Facebook Engineer very much

  3. Reply Reese Dec 4,2011 2:28 pm

    Well lately I have seen a lot of people who use their Facebook wall as a journal so I guess now when they vent they do not have to keep it short and sweet, they can one raise one heck of a hell. But this is really interesting. I never really bothered to check before.

  4. Reply Lalit@Samsung Tablet Dec 19,2011 6:31 pm

    This is indeed huge characters available for spammers on facebook and I think a genuine status on facebook will require a few hundred characters maximum.

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