Fire Off Rants on Facebook with New 60,000 Character Limit

Posted 12/02/2011 at 11:14am | by Paul Lilly

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Readers of Maximum PC know that our own Gordon Mah Ung hates social networking. But he loves to rant, as evidenced by our podcasts, and if he ever chose to embrace Facebook, he could spout off whatever injustices he feels like raging about, 60,000 characters at a time. Actually, Facebook bumped up the posting limit to 63,206, and we're sure Gordon would have no trouble ranting for an additional 3,000 characters.

"In September, we increased the character limit on status updates to 5,000 characters. Today, we're announcing that you can now write posts with more than 60,000 characters," Vadim Lavrusik, Journalist Program Manager for Facebook, wrote in a post.

Facebook didn't provide any details or insight into the decision to stretch the character limit, but we can surmise that it's yet another tip of the hat to Google Plus, which limits posts to around 100,000 characters. But why did Facebook settle on precisely 63,206 characters?

"I set the exact limit to something nerdy," Bob Baldin, a software engineer at Facebook, explained in a post. " Facebook ... Face Boo K ... hex(FACE) - K ... 64206 - 1000 = 63206 :-)"

Nerdy indeed, and a welcome extension for those who like to post long winded posts. Prior to March 2009, Facebook limited posts to 160 characters before bumping it up to 420. Then in July 2011, Facebook again increased the limit by raising it to 500 characters, followed by 5,000 characters in September 2011.

To put the new character limit in perspective, Facebook says a novel has roughly 500,000 characters, which could be shared in just 9 posts.