Yeah it’s been a while since I lit up the grill, but today it felt like I hadn’t missed a beat. It took a couple pizzas to get the dough stretching down, but when I did it turned out great.

Check out how my margherita pizza came out!

I recently wrote about the importance of the first 320 characters for a Facebook event. The rationale at the time was that Facebook would auto-publish the event to your Page wall and only the first 320 characters would be visible on the wall. The rest could be read if the reader clicked through to the event page.

Recently (in the last week), Facebook revamped their Facebook event page design and, low and behold, Facebook now truncates your event description. Gone are the days when you could provide every detail for your event without really thinking about the layout. Now Facebook will show the first 400? characters (haven’t confirmed the exact character count yet), and the rest will be hidden behind a “see more” link.

I like this new change for one reason, it helps me sell the importance of the first couple lines in a Facebook event. I’ve always advocated the need to keep descriptions short and action oriented. Here’s the anatomy of future Facebook events I create for organizations:

• [150 words to briefly describe the event and why the reader wants to come]
• [Shortened links to purchase tickets and/or learn more about the event]
• [Ancillary information that can provide more value, but can also be found in other areas]

The attention span of the average reader is shrinking, so our copy should be shrinking to match it.