Facebook increases status update character limit to 63,206

By | November 30, 2011, 5:44pm PST

Summary: Facebook has increased the status update box character limit to 63,206. That’s more than a 12-fold increase over the last limit of 5,000 characters.

Two months ago, Facebook increased its status update character limit from 500 to 5,000. Today, the social network has bumped it up again, this time by a 12-fold increase to 60,000 characters.

As you can see in the screenshot above, this is a huge character count; I honestly don’t see why you would ever want to write such a long status update. In fact, when I was testing this limit, Facebook stopped responding in both Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome when I tried seeing what would happen if I put in 100,000 characters.

Wrestling with my old laptop for a bit longer, I found that the actual limit for Facebook is now 63,206 characters. If you put in more, 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.

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 :-).”

The change to a 63,206-character status update pulls Facebook further away from the 140-character limit that Twitter is so famous for. While Facebook keeps increasing its limit, Twitter is perfectly happy with keeping its tweets limited to 140 characters.

The limit for Google+ appears to be 100,000 characters. When I put in anything over, I was given the following error message: “There was a problem saving your post. Please try again.”

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Emil Protalinski has covered the tech industry for five years for multiple publications.

Disclosure

Emil Protalinski

Emil has nothing to disclose.

Biography

Emil Protalinski

Emil Protalinski has covered the tech industry for five years for multiple publications, including Neowin for two years and Ars Technica for three years. He has written 1,000s of articles for both, with a particular focus on scrutinizing Microsoft products and services. Recently, Emil has expanded his coverage to non-Microsoft technologies, including the social networking giant Facebook.

Talkback Most Recent of 3 Talkback(s)

  • RE: Facebook increases status update character limit to 63,206
    So essentially it's limitless. You can basically use either Google+ or Facebook as a blog if you want now, complete with long, rambling posts and articles like ZDNet provides.

    And honestly - I *barely* use Twitter. For the most part, I just follow a few people who don't use anything else. I don't see the point in it. The 140 character limit has caused us to horrendously kill the English language, and I don't think it's helped our thought process either. Very difficult to explain anything in any sort of detail in 140 characters. It's the most horrendous limitation you can have on communications, and I really don't see why anybody would stand for it.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    CobraA1
    1st Dec
  • RE: Facebook increases status update character limit to 63,206
    so now people can put entire pamphlets in a single status. What happens when there's a 20,000 character viral repost. people's feeds are gonna resemble Myspace. Maybe this will cause the fall of facebook and google+ or someone else can move this social networking thing forward
    ZDNet Gravatar
    dariquew@...
    2nd Dec
  • RE: Facebook increases status update character limit to 63,206
    ...if 63,000 characters is the answer... what was the question?
    ZDNet Gravatar
    jhlundin
    2nd Dec

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