A status that drifts up off an avatar - as a thought, puffs rolling into a cloud, or as a message, a bubble whose tail was the puffs all along.
Nothing here is drawn as a cloud. It's a handful of plain circles and one rounded rectangle behind the text, run through a goo filter: blur everything slightly, then snap the soft edges back to hard ones. Shapes close enough for their blur to touch melt into one outline, and shapes further apart stay separate. The two puffs sit just outside that reach, so they read as dots. The cloud is a ring of overlapping circles around the text, bigger on top and flatter underneath, so it comes out billowy rather than pill-shaped.
Each shape has its own spring and a small delay, so the puffs come up first and the billows roll out from the corner nearest them. Every piece rises a few pixels and swells slightly past its size before settling, and the whole outline starts behind a light haze that clears as it forms, so it condenses instead of popping in. Once it's up, the billows breathe on a slow loop.
A message is the same shapes in different places. The billows sink back into the middle, the rectangle grows out to the text's edges, and the two puffs slide into its bottom-left corner. Now they're close enough to melt, so they fuse into the tail. One value from 0 to 1 drives all of it, which is why switching while it's open morphs one bubble straight into the other.