In Feb. of 2004, Facebook (News - Alert) was launched for the first time to the Harvard University students and by the following Dec., the website had nearly one million active users from other universities. These are fairly impressive numbers for such a short period of time, but not as extraordinary as the number 750 million, which is the amount of active users reported by Facebook this past July.

In 2010 it was reported by Search Engine Land that Facebook’s statistics page claimed that users post more than 60 million status updates every day. When the number was broken down mathematically, the results were 700 Facebook status updates per second.

Yesterday Facebook’s Vadim Lavrusik, a journalist program manager, advertised a post in his photo’s section of the Fan Page that Facebook is now allowing users to write post that can contain more than 60,000 characters. That is a staggering increase from its 5,000 characters they just announced in September. So, for those who were waiting for the time to share their memoirs with their friends, here’s your chance.

According to the photo posted by Lavrusik, the original status update started with 160 characters. By March of 2009 it was upped to 420, in July 2011 it slightly increased to 500, and now the number of characters allowed is novel worthy. The post even mentions that a novel has roughly 500,000 characters which in turn, can be shared in nine posts.

To think of a status update, post, or group message that would need more than 60,000 characters seems unbelievable. After all, Twitter’s (News - Alert) limit is a mere 140 characters and in 2010 they had reported 50 million tweets per day. In an article by Mashable they asked Lavrusik the exact number of characters allowed to users, and according to Lavrusik it’s 63,206.

Recently noted in an article by Tech Gadgets Web, the increase in characters is to help business pages market themselves more thoroughly with enticing updates. This is to increase the number of unique visitors to their website and promote their company. However, according to the article, research has displayed that long status updates only detract users not engage them.

If this is Facebook’s way of finding an advantage over the new Google (News - Alert)+, it probably won’t work, seeing as how Google+ has an unlimited amount of characters for updates. To add another achievement of Google+, within three weeks of their beta version testing they reportedly had 20 million users.

Regardless of increased character limits or new features, Facebook remains the supreme amongst any other social networking site. With competition at their heels, it should be interesting to see what new idea they will come up with next.