Facebook Increases Status Update Character Limit…Nooooo!

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Earlier this week a Journalist Program Manager at Facebook (Vadim Lavrusik) posted a significant change to how much you can type in your status updates on Facebook. They decided to raise the character limit from 5,000 to 63,206.

Why 63,206??

Well,Bob Baldwin,one of Facebook’s software engineers explained it on his wall this way:“I set the exact limit to something nerdy,for now. Facebook …Face Boo K …hex(FACE) –K …64206 –1000 = 63206” Aren’t you sorry you asked?

Personally I think this is a ridiculous amount,however they might have been feeling pressure from Google + limit of 100,000 characters! To try to gain some perspective on how much 63k characters is,I’ve found that the average word count for modern American novels is 90k,which would be roughly 585k characters. So basically you can write the great American novel on Facebook in just 10 posts (or just 6 posts on G+)!

Now I really wonder why they did this. Yes I think part of it is in the spirit of competition with Google Plus,however there has been a growing trend with Facebook to give you fewer reasons to ever leave this social networking platform. YouTube videos can be played right within the site,as can games and even full blockbuster movies. You can also chat with friends or talk with them live over video (who needs Skype now?). And businesses love it because they can collect emails right through opt-in boxes on their pages and sell their products all without ever having to click over to an external website. It’s pretty genius actually.

So am I the only one who thinks this is an effort to replace the need to even do external blogging? I still 100% think all businesses should have their own blog they control on their own host and don’t leave everything to the whim of a 3rd party social networking site,but that doesn’t mean Facebook wouldn’t want everyone to convert over.

I just hope my Facebook home page doesn’t become filled with one gigantic post that blocks out the fun of scrolling through all my friends updates!

So are you excited about the thought of being able to write more to your friends,are you annoyed by this,or do you really just not care??

P.S. This post contains 2,254 characters;not a drop in the bucket of what is allowed!

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