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.