The Facebook+Journalists Page announced that now everyone can write posts with 60,000 characters, making status updates feel more like the not-so-often used notes feature, which doesn’t appear at all in the Facebook Timeline-version at all.
The amount of characters one can write into a Facebook status update has been steadily increasing over the years, growing from 160 (how Twitter-like!) to 420, then to 500. In September, it reached 5,000. This new jump seems abrupt; the last big increase was 4,500 characters. This one is 55,000 characters, or 12 times as many characters as before.
The Facebook status has experienced a good deal of changes. In August 2010, Facebook started auto-suggesting Facebook pages, groups interest and even to other users in status updates. “Memorable Status Updates” began showing up earlier this year. It surfaced seemingly random old status updates in a user’s sidebar. Many users were uninterested in seeing these old statuses, and many reported seeing statuses that had been deleted.
Facebook hopes that the new, super-long status updates will encourage even more sharing, which will move users one step closer to complete lifestreaming. This new status update in conjunction with the imminent Timeline rollout make that even more plausible. Facebook, for one, sure does hope so.
