Facebook has a 5000 Friend limit, meaning you can’t have more than 5000 facebook friends, and once you hit this limit Facebook won’t let you have any more friends.

Being an excel guru, I knew that older versions of excel had a 65,536 row limit per worksheet. That meant you couldn’t store more than 65,536 rows in excel, the geeks among us would recognize 65,536 as a 2 raised to the 16th power, so the number itself suggest it’s a system limitation that prevented excel from exceeded 65,536 rows. Facebook on the other hand has a very nice round number of 5000. That suggests that is was  a very careful design consideration to limit the number of friends you have rather than some database limitation. Personally I don’t even have 1,000 friends so it’s unlikely to bother me, but it did bother quite a number of people who now have turned to fan pages to broadcast their message on facebook.

The topic though, got me wondering what other limits there were on the web:

4 - The maximum amount of RAM (in GB) you can have on 32-bit machine.

5 - The maximum size (in TB) of a file upload to Amazon S3

25 - The maximum size of you file (in MB) as your largest attachment in an email sent from Gmail

110- The maximum speed (in km/hour) you’re allowed to travel on Malaysian highways

140 - The maximum number of characters you can type in on your Tweet on twitter

148 - The maximum number of Apps you can install on your iPhone4 (including apples standard 19)

1000- The maximum number of friends you can have in Orkut

2000- The maximum number of followers you’re allowed to have on Twitter

2083 - The maximum number of characters Internet Explorer can support as a URL

5,000 - The maximum number of friends you can have in Facebook

30,000 - The maximum number of connections you can have on LinkedIn

65,536 - The maximum number of rows you can have in Excel (2003 and below)

299,792,458 - The maximum speed (in metres/second) of any object i.e. the speed of light

4,300,000,000 - The maximum number of unique IP addresses possible under the old IPV4 standard

6,775,235,700 - Population of planet earth

And finally, the big mother load!!

298,000,000,000 - Number of emails sent over the internet…..EVERYDAY!!

Granted the last two aren’t really limits, they do show you the sheer enormity of the internet.