Facebook status limit now 400 times bigger than Twitter's

Facebook has decided to increase the limit of status updates on the site to 63,206 characters – a far cry from the 140 characters of Twitter.

Facebook hasn't yet revealed the reason for allowing over 60,000 characters in a post but it seems that it could well be used to post long-form content for journalists.

This isn't the first change the social network has made to its status character limit in 2011. Back in March it upped the limit from 500 to 5,000 and now it has expanded this again by over 10 times.

Originally Facebook used the much more conservative and SMS friendly character count of 160 when it was first made available to the general public.

State of the status

Facebook's update about its, er, status update was actually rather short.

It explained: "You can now write posts with more than 60,000 characters, including status, group and wall posts.

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

And if you think talk of character couldn't get any geekier, software engineer Bob Baldwin came up with the precise limit through an equation-cum-Easter egg: "I set the exact limit to something nerdy. Facebook ... Face Boo K ... hex(FACE) - K ... 64206 - 1000 = 63206 :-)" he wrote on hit Facebook wall.

Despite upping the limit, Facebook still gets beaten hands down by Google+ when it comes to status updates, as it allows up to 100,000 characters.