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It’s April 20th (4/20) today. While this number will ring quite a different bell to some of you, it reminded us of the maximum number of characters in a Facebook status update : 420. Now if you’ve ever tried to post a status update longer than 420 characters, you’ll have encountered the Status Update Too Long error: “Status updates must be less than 420 characters. You have entered xxx characters here. Notes can be much longer. Would you like to edit and post your update as a Note instead?” What if you don’t want to post a note? What if you just wanted to post a very long status update ? Well, here’s a simple hack to bypass the error message: Step 1 Instead of sharing a regular “Status”, click the “Photo” tab and choose “Upload a Photo” from your drive. Step 2 Now select an image on your hard drive to post along your lengthy update. You can choose something that relates to its content, use a 1x1 white pixel image. Step 3 Before you click the Share button, enter your extremely long...

This is basic Facebook 101, but I’m sure that most of you have -at least one time- hit the maximum length of a status update. A Facebook status update is limited to 420 characters (including spaces). Let’s compare with the maximum length of a few other statuses: The Facebook status message limit equals the max. number of characters of a single SMS or mobile text message. The length of a tweet on Twitter is slightly more limited: 140 characters. And a personal status message on Windows Live Messenger is restricted to 128 characters. Our blog’s slogan states that people nowadays read status updates instead of books, and that’s because the 100-and-something character limits of these services turn our everyday stories into easily consumable microcontent for the masses. That said, it definitely requires some training and creativity to express yourself everytime in just 160 characters or less. Occasionally, I wish people in real life would be restricted to 160 letters when they rant about s...