Why doesn’t Twitter’s chat service support PDF files?

As you might have gathered, I’ve been using Twitter lately to see what the fuss is about. A friend messaged me on the service and I tried to send him a 105 KB PDF file. This was impossible to do. Only images and text can be sent through Twitter’s “Messages” chat system. Facebook Messenger, on the other hand, which would be the obvious system for Twitter’s programmers to copy, can handle this easily (up to 25 MB).

Is there a good reason that Twitter left this out or is it an example of the kind of obvious flaw in their product that Elon Musk can correct to boost the enterprise value? It is never good to force people to hop over to Facebook or iMessage or Gmail if they want to communicate on your own platform, right?

2 thoughts on “Why doesn’t Twitter’s chat service support PDF files?

  1. Twitter is a dumpster fire. It has the slowest and most bloated pages on the entire Internet. On an old machine, sometimes YouTube loads faster than Twitter’s 20 text messages (200 bytes each!).

  2. I agree 100% and I also think that Facebook should allow PDF uploads into regular Timeline posts, not just in Messenger. It’s obvious from using Gmail that Google/Alphabet has the technology to render PDFs attached to messages on the fly (along with Word and Excel documents to a slightly lesser extent.) Why Facebook can’t do this is totally beyond me.

    I occasionally do some work for rock bands and I produce high-quality CMYK 300DPI and up PDF renderings using vectors for text wherever possible so they can print high-quality posters.
    Gmail renders those PDFs perfectly – and FAST. It just blitzes through big PDFs and displays the fully-rendered images at screen resolution, but because these people are on Facebook, they can’t upload PDFs, and I have to produce additional JPEGs for use on their Facebook pages.

    Dumb! They have the capability to churn through those files and render anything “dangerous” completely inert. Why they don’t do that is a riddle.

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