It’s Kind of Cheesy

Being Green

Apple is petty sometimes

A few months ago my friend Edd Dumbill shared a discovery. He pointed out that if you search Twitter for the words “green bubbles” you’ll find very consistent results. People hate green bubbles. Example:

I’ve been performing that same Twitter search every few days and there’s usually someone new complaining. The modern world is against green bubbles.

What those tweets are referring to is how iPhones deal with text messages. When an iPhone texts an iPhone (comin’ through the rye) via Apple’s iMessage service, the outgoing text appears in calm blue. Like this:

But when an iPhone texts with a non-iPhone, the outgoing messages appears with a vibrant—some might say harsh—green background.

Judging by the hatred on Twitter this anti-green bubble phenomenon is shared broadly by all kinds of people.

This spontaneous anti-green-bubble brigade is an interesting example of how sometimes very subtle product decisions in technology influence the way culture works. Apple uses a soothing, on-brand blue for messages in its own texting platform, and a green akin to that of the Android robot logo for people texting from outside its ecosystem (as people have pointed out on Twitter, iPhone texts were default green in days before iMessage—but it was shaded and more pleasant to the eye; somewhere along the line things got flat and mean).

There are all sorts of reasons for them to use different colors. (iMessage texts are seen as data, not charged on a per-text basis, and so the different colors allow people to register how much a given conversation will cost—useful!) However, one result of that decision is that a goofy class war is playing out over digital bubble colors. Their decision has observable social consequences.

Oh God, What Is “Product”?

The Android logo in a familiar shade.

I should probably pause and define product management, because many people who are reading this will only have a vague sense of what it means. And worse, “product” is a hard word to define. It has a specific meaning in Silicon Valley and Seattle, whereas on the East Coast of the United States it’s usually sort of lumped in with design. (I have no idea how people see “product” in other digital corridors in Mumbai, London, Paris, Toronto, or Beijing; please enlighten me in the comments.)

Wikipedia, normally my first resort, has one of its weird crowdsourced definitions: Product management is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning, forecasting, and production, or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle. Oof. Here’s what you get when you image search “organizational lifecycle function.”

Poop. I like to do prophylactic images searches because they will tell you faster than anything which terms are bullshit or not. “Organizational lifecycle function” — bullshit

So that’s a nightmare. Luckily, last year, Ellen Chisa wrote up a pretty good history of product management for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Queue. She cites one definition of the job as “a role that involved designing user interfaces, writing functional specs, coordinating teams, and serving as the customer advocate.” Okay! That’s useful. I mean you need to know what user interfaces, functional specs, and customer advocacy are, but trust me, those are mostly-real things delivered by mostly-real people.

Okay, so that’s how a product manager spends her time. But what does that actually get you?

Let me use an example that is very close to home. You know Medium.com, the publishing platform where you’re reading these words? You know Genius.com, the lyrics-and-what-have-you annotation platform? What if I told you that…Medium and Genius are basically the same website?

I mean you have to squint, but consider: Each service allows a (1) User; to post a (2) Text; and then (3) lets other Users select (4) Text Spans; and add (5) Annotations in the right-hand-column. They see text, and data, and users, in suprisingly similar ways. I think you could build a very Medium-like website on top of the technical infrastructure of Genius, and you could build a very Genius-like website using the technical infrastructure of Medium. Both are well-funded, professionally-operated organizations with big ambitions.