On Facebook, the company team posted an image whose graphic text announced a new limit for status updates: 63,206 characters. It’s rather staggering if compared to Twitter’s or even Facebook’s own from a few years back. Nevertheless, Google weighs in as the heavyweight champ in this matter; it currently boasts a peerless 100,000 character limit.
It’s still a very nice try from Facebook. The graphic also displays a nifty timeline of Facebook’s rapid progression into the character limit stratosphere with shaded box visualizations and all to compare the limit increases. Originally, FB’s updates could not exceed 160 characters, but that changed in 2009 to 420 characters. This past July it reached 500; two months later 5,000, and less than three months afterwards it’s at 63,206. Is there a reason for the accelerating limit?
There’s no clear info on that besides Mark Zuckerberg and Co. not wanting to let Google out-edge it in any important factor. If that’s solely the case, then another value increase may be in the works. Although, the final value seems to not have been completely random. According to Bob Baldwin, the software engineer who “chose” the number, he reached it through the following “nerdy” way: “Facebook … Face Boo K … hex(FACE) – K … 64206 – 1000 = 63206.” Go figure.
Read More:
https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/203969696349811