In what almost feels like an exponential progression, Facebook has updated their previous 5,000 character limit to a whopping 60,000 characters. The change was first discovered by All Facebook on the Facebook+Journalists page announcing the upped limit as well as outlining the history of such limit changes.

In September 2011, Facebook made their first giant leap from 500 characters (set in July 2011, up only a smidge from March 2011’s 420 character size) to 5,000 characters.

According to some research at Inside Facebook, the longer status updates appear in the Live Ticker just the same as any others; except that they’re truncated after about 400 characters. Experiments have shown that the actual limit isn’t precisely 60k characters, but instead appear to be near exactly 63,206 characters.

This significance of this number doesn’t seem to be related to computer science, so some digging later revealed that it’s actually an engineer’s whimsy:

“How did Facebook arrive at the 63,206 character limit?” asked Inside Facebook. “According to Facebook engineer Bob Baldwin, ‘I set the exact limit to something nerdy. Facebook … Face Boo K … hex(FACE) – K … 64206 – 1000 = 63206 :-)’.”

The lengthened status updates are designed to promote longer posting by Facebook residents and to differentiate them from Twitter updates. After the first big jump to 5K, it would allow members to make long updates rather than having to use the Note feature on their Facebook Wall. As a result, hoping to push users towards spending more time writing up their thoughts.

Perhaps Facebook is hoping people will be sharing their Christmas holiday and winter season recipes and to share their extended experiences as the holidays come crashing down on us. Although, I think they might want to change the update matter so that the now-common “tl;dr” phrase could be plucked out and used in the live feed.