Facebook recently increased its post limits by an order of magnitude bringing the number of workds that can be included in a post from five thousand to over sixty thousand. To put that in perspective, the average novel contains about 500.000 words which means that you could post one to Facebook using just nine posts!
Unlike the recent increase in photo size, I think this will actually be a negative for the platform. Facebook is all about getting people to communicate in a fluid way getting to the essentials of what they have to say to each other. The art of the facebook post has always been to capture the essence of an idea in a short easy-to-digest message.
Length influences the style of messaging as Twitter illustrates milluons of times a day. The effort is very squarely on the shoulders of the author who has to squeeze a ton of relevance into only 140 characters. But once its out there, awareness, processing and reaction are all super-fast. Facebook’s style was often like that. If you had more detail, you put it elsewhere and linked to it.
The problem with these larger posts is that people will be tempted to use this limit. Talkative friends will put tons of detail into their posts and marketers will paste in whole press releases. The result may well be more clutter and less meaningful communication than before. I don’t even want to think of what it will do to the mobile experience.
Do you think these limits will change anything or just go unnoticed?