Facebook Makes Room for Big Talkers

If you listen to people yak on and on on their cell phones, you might wonder how they ever manage to cram their great and numerous thoughts into the tiny little space provided by Facebook.

Well, fear no more, motormouths.  Facebook has has extended the maximum length of status updates to 60,000 characters, 12 times what it used to be.  

That's about the length of a short story -- or about a tenth the size of your average novel, so you'd think it would be plenty of space for the average tidings glad and otherwise expressed on Facebook each day.

After all, how long does it take to say you're planning to go to the gym today, even though it's cloudy and Aunt Myrtle said she might drop by later unless she decides to take the cat for its pedicure instead, or not?

Maybe Facebook is trying to make up for being careless with everyone's private data?  More likely, it's responding to Googe+, which claims to have no character limit.

By the way, thanks a lot Google for putting that cute little "+" symbol in there.  Doesn't it remind you of Yahoo!?  Makes for clumsy punctuation but then they don't teach English in young geek school, apparently.

Maybe they don't teach forthrightness, either.  Josh Constine at TechCrunch writes that he has found Google+ won't publish anything over 100,000 chracters, returning a vague error message after that point. Infinity and beyond?  Not quite.

Constine notes that Facebook has been steadily upgrading its feature set since G+ came along, hoping to blunt Google's quantitative advantages.

You think this is a good idea?  Let us know, but please ... be brief.