Your New Facebook Status: 63,206 Characters or Less

Twitter, as everyone and their tweeting dog knows, limits your status updates to 140 characters. But Facebook? Facebook laughs in the face of such limitations. On Facebook, 140 characters is barely clearing your throat. In a blog post Wednesday, Facebook’s Journalist Program Manager (and Mashable alum) Vadim Lavrusik announced that the limit of Facebook status updates has now been upped to “more than 60,000 characters.” When Mashable asked, Lavrusik explained what that meant, exactly: You can now post a status update measuring 63,206 characters.

But not one character more than that. Sorry, would-be Facebook novelists; you’ll have to split your prose into multiple updates. (As Lavrusik points out, an average novel will now require nine status updates.) This also goes for group messages and posts on your friends’ walls — so you can now annoy the heck out of them with unreasonably long catch-up messages.

Facebook update character limits have been expanding almost as rapidly as the social network itself. Until March 2009, the limit was barely bigger than Twitter’s, at 160 characters. Then 420 characters marked the end of your post’s potential. This summer, it jumped from 500 to 5,000, and now the limit has hit the stratosphere.

So much for social media keeping things short and sweet. At least one Facebook user has already attempted a status update with 60,000 characters of nonsense words, but he’ll need to add 3,206 more to hit the limit.