Fishbowl (4 page)

There were a few more registrations the next day. But the number went down, the exact opposite of what should have happened if the site was going to go viral. People weren't recommending the site to their friends. Worse, as Andrei could see from the data on site visits, those who had registered weren't coming back.

Everything moves fast on the net. It doesn't take months of negotiating to rent a store front – equally, it doesn't take months of waiting to see if a business is a failure.

The verdict was swift. By day three it was over. Fishbowll, in the form initially conceived by Andrei Koss, had failed.

4

ALTHOUGH HE HAD
told himself that he would waste no more time with the website if people didn't like it, Andrei continued to obsess over Fishbowll. There was something about the idea behind it that just wouldn't leave him alone. He couldn't help feeling that at the core of what Fishbowll was about there was something that had genuine and significant utility out there in the real world, in orders of magnitude greater than anything he had done before. There had to be a value in having a means to explore the things you most cared about with people from radically different backgrounds who cared about the same things. He believed people would want that. He also believed that it was a good thing in itself. Surely the more people saw that others who were apparently different from them in every way actually had something in common with them, the more people would come together.

Andrei also felt that the time had come for him to stick with something. He could have made a lot more money from the app he had sold, he knew, if only he had been prepared to work more on the cosmetics. Other people who were prepared to do that – people who would never have had the idea for it in the first place – had made that money instead. And other things he had done, he knew, had failed because he was only prepared to do the stuff that came easily to him: solve the programming challenges, and not the stuff that didn't excite him. Well, if he was ever to interest people in anything he coded, that would have to change. What was the point of coding anything if no one was interested in it?
And if he was going to change, why not now, when he had this idea for a thing that he really believed people might want?

But how? What should he do with the site he had created and which now languished unused on his server space? He pondered the problem during classes. He cornered anyone who had looked at Fishbowll and was foolish enough to come within earshot. No one had much in the way of ideas except ranking. But ranking, Andrei was sure, wasn't the answer. A ranked list was still just a list, highlighting the same experts and authorities that any other search would turn up, which wasn't what he had set out to do. Plus, if the top few people on the list refused to engage – which they would, surely, after the first few hundred people had tried to contact them – the list would be worse than useless.

Charles Gok was so caught up in his world of theoretical physics that he had never actually gone onto the Fishbowll site. Ben and Kevin would probably have forgotten about it if Andrei hadn't continued to badger them. They were more caught up in the experiment with Dan Cooley, who was still resolutely wearing the Nike swoosh. Ben was starting to become uneasy about the experiment and was beginning to think it was time to concede defeat, but every time Kevin caught a glimpse of Cooley wearing Nikes, in the quad, or in Ricker dining hall, where most of the students from Robinson House ate, he felt it as a personal slap in the face. The whole of Robinson House was watching. Kevin was determined to see the three stripes on Cooley's feet and was using all his considerable hacking skills in a final push for victory. Dan Cooley was now the lucky recipient of a series of bonus offers available only to first-time purchasers of Adidas sneakers, delivered direct to his inbox.

Opinion in Robinson House was divided over the legitimacy of this tactic and a number of bets were declared void.

Andrei, meanwhile, felt as if Fishbowll was going to drive him crazy. The same ideas for the website kept going around in his head, and none of them seemed right. He was getting to the point where he felt that he would somehow have to force himself to stop thinking about it if he was going to stay sane.

‘Maybe give us a selection,' said Ben in exasperation, when Andrei had cornered him and Kevin in the common room again. ‘Not the whole list, just a few names.'

‘Then it won't be comprehensive!' objected Andrei.

‘Andrei, we can't cope with comprehensive! How many times do I have to tell you? We're timid little creatures of limited brainpower. It's too much!'

‘How big a selection?' asked Andrei.

‘I don't know. Ten. Twenty. Something we can get our heads around.'

‘How do I choose them? And don't say ranking.
Don't
say ranking. Ranking's not the answer.'

‘Then do it randomly!' said Kevin, who was just as sick of Fishbowll as Ben, and even more exasperated by Dan Cooley's recalcitrance to every blandishment he could think of. ‘Dude, give us ten, randomly selected. OK? That's it! I'm getting dinner. Who wants to come?'

‘I'm coming,' said Ben. ‘Is Charles around?'

‘Who knows?'

‘Charles …?'

They waited for a moment.

‘OK,' said Kevin. ‘Let's go.'

Kevin and Ben headed out. Andrei followed them, shambling down the corridor and down the stairs disconsolately.

They went down to the quad and headed for Ricker.

‘Do you really think that's what I should do?' said Andrei as they walked. ‘Cut down the long list and just give a selection of names?'

Kevin sighed. ‘Dude! Please! Enough!'

‘I'm saying that instead of these gimungous lists,' said Ben, ‘you should give us a randomly selected list that we can handle. Ten names. Whatever.'

‘Put a gender filter in,' said Kevin. ‘At least make it so we can choose the girls.'

‘It's not a dating site!' retorted Andrei.

‘Dude, every place you can connect with on the internet is a dating site.'

‘That's too depressing.'

Ben shrugged. ‘Ben's right, Andrei. Look at Dan Cooley.'

‘What's he got to do with it? Has he developed a dating site?'

Kevin laughed. ‘Only way he'd get a lay.'

‘Dan responds to Kev—I mean
Jeff
, because he thinks Jeff's interested in him.'

‘You think he's gay?' said Kevin, his face suddenly lighting up. ‘Maybe I can offer him some kind of discount on Adidas sneakers for, like, gay buyers.'

Ben looked at Kevin incredulously for a moment. ‘I'm not saying he's gay. What I'm saying is, Dan responds to Jeff because he thinks Jeff's interested in him. It makes him feel special. Once you feel special, you respond.'

Andrei had no idea what that had to do with Fishbowll. ‘When you get a name on Fishbowll, it's obvious why you're interested in that person – because you share the same interest.'

‘But why that person and nobody else in the five million names on your list?' said Ben.

Andrei shrugged.

‘Exactly. You don't know. Look, Andrei, it's got to be a journey, and the journey has to start with some kind of impulse.'

Andrei stopped and stared at him. ‘What does that mean?'

‘I don't know, exactly. It's just …'

‘Dude, everything's a journey,' said Kevin.

‘Everything should be a journey,' said Ben. ‘This should be a journey of discovery.'

‘It is!' said Andrei impatiently. ‘You choose a name and you connect and you see what happens. What's that if it's not a journey?'

‘Well, if that's the journey, people aren't taking it. It's like—'

‘It's like they're in the departure lounge and they've got ten thousand flights on the board and who knows how the hell which ticket to buy?' said Kevin.

‘Normally, you've got a ticket by the time you're in the departure lounge,' replied Andrei coolly.

‘Andrei,' said Ben, ‘whether you're in the lounge yet or not is not the point.'

‘What is the point?'

‘The point is no one gets on the plane! They see your list but they don't choose a name. And then they don't even come back to the site.'

‘And that's their problem!'

‘It's not their problem, Andrei. It's
your
problem. If you want them to use— Oh, sorry.'

They had stopped as they argued, and a couple of girls wanted to get past on the pavement. They stepped back and let them through.

‘Put in a gender filter,' murmured Kevin, as they watched the two girls go.

‘It's not a dating site!' cried Andrei in exasperation.

‘Look, the gender filter's not important,' said Ben. ‘It's the sense of journey. And the sense of being … wanted. I don't know. Somehow, if you can get that, maybe you can do something with this.'

Andrei was staring after the girls.

‘Andrei?'

‘You like one of them?' said Kevin, glancing at the girls walking away from them. ‘The one on the left, she's kind of hot.'

‘I …' For a moment Andrei continued to stare. Then he turned.

‘Hey!' said Kevin. ‘Aren't you coming to eat?'

Andrei was heading back to the quad.

‘You want us to bring you something back?' called out Ben.

Andrei had broken into a kind of run. He turned a corner, and was out of sight.

‘Well that was … odd,' said Kevin.

Ben nodded.

‘Should we go after him?'

‘Why?'

Kevin shrugged. ‘I don't know.'

Ben punched him on the shoulder. ‘Come on. Let's eat.'

They went on to Ricker. Inside, they picked up trays and joined the queue. A few places ahead of them in the line was Dan Cooley. It had become second nature for them to glance at Dan Cooley's feet whenever they glimpsed him.

Three stripes!

Kevin and Ben looked at each other, expressions of incredulity breaking out on their faces.

‘Hey, Dan,' Kevin said, taking a couple of steps forward, around the queue. ‘Nice sneakers.'

Dan nodded.

‘When did you get them?'

‘I just bought them.'

‘Cool. But aren't they Adidas? You like Nike, right?'

Dan looked at Kevin curiously, his mouth gaping a little, wondering how Kevin Embley, who he had spoken to maybe twice in his entire life, knew about that.

A few other people in the queue and at nearby tables were grinning.

‘Don't you like Nike?' asked Kevin.

‘I … changed my mind,' said Dan. The look of confusion on his face had grown deeper. He glanced around. Quite a few people were laughing now. A whisper was running around the dining hall. ‘What's going on?' he said.

‘Don't you know, you butthead?' yelled somebody from a table. ‘Kevin's the guy you've been talking to sneakers about!'

Cooley stared. Now there was utter silence in the dining hall.

‘Are you Jeff?' he murmured.

Kevin stared back at him.

Dan Cooley dropped his tray. ‘There are rules here against that kind of thing, you know!' he yelled, and he ran out of the dining hall in his new Adidas sneakers.

There was laughter again.

‘Dude, is there a rule against that?' whispered Kevin.

Ben shrugged.

Kevin glanced around. People were looking at them now. ‘Shit,' he whispered. ‘This doesn't feel good.'

5

SOMETHING HAD HAPPENED
inside Andrei's head on that walk to Ricker. The arguments and conversations that had been brewing for so long inside his mind had formed a thick, fermenting mist that had seemed to be getting denser and darker, but suddenly all the murk and muck were blown away in one gigantic, cleansing explosion and he was left with pure, piercing clarity.

He got it. He absolutely got it. A gigantic list of names was way too impersonal, and way too intimidating. People wanted to connect with
people
. Not only did they want to connect with people – and this was the point he hadn't got until somehow Ben's words had flicked the switch in his head that had set off the explosion – they wanted to connect with people
who wanted to connect with them
.

So how did you give them that experience? That was the question.

Somehow, the answer was immediately there, as if it had been in his mind all along.

Andrei got to work, coding effortlessly, completely in the zone. At some point Ben and Kevin came back to the common room. He was oblivious to them. After a while, they gave up trying to tell him what had happened with Dan Cooley, almost fearful of what might happen if they did manage to disturb him, as one might be fearful of waking a sleepwalker.

Andrei kept the site simple and lean. When one opened Fishbowll as a user now, you were still asked what interests you wanted to share with others; you were still asked to choose
between people from the whole world, a continent or a country. But then the site did something completely different. It asked whether you wanted to see the people who wanted to meet you, or whether you wanted to take a chance on seeing if anyone else wanted you to meet them.

If you clicked on the first option, a screen came up showing reduced-size screen-grabs of nine people's home pages. You could get a page view of the screen-grab by putting your cursor on the image. Under each image, in keeping with the piscine theme of the website, was a button saying, ‘Take my Bait?' If you clicked on that, the home page enlarged to full screen, with a message box in the lower right corner to write to the other person.

If you clicked on the second option, up came a screen of nine reduced-size screen-grabs to which you could send a ‘Take my Bait?' message of your own.

Andrei chose nine as the number of contacts, not out of any strict scientific rationale but because it seemed like the right kind of number – enough to give a meaty menu, but not too much to make it impossible to choose. A set of three by three screen-grabs also worked well on the screen. Every way he looked at it, this new format seemed to answer the objections everyone had raised. It was a selection of people – not a list of thousands. It made you feel wanted – these people had expressed a desire to meet someone just like you. It was the start of a journey – taking a Bait was the first step into the unknown.

The coding was simple to do. Everything seemed to flow – vision, design, code. A couple of inspired wheelspins and it was done.

But there was still a problem – no one was registered on the site, so there would be nobody to send Baits to anybody else. The first users who clicked on the option to meet the people who wanted to meet them would find … nobody. And if they found nobody, nobody would ever come back.

So certain was Andrei that the site had to look as he now conceived it that he knew he had to come up with a solution. It turned out to be relatively simple. Rather than finding people
who had registered and actually expressed a desire to meet others with a similar interest – which, one day, when there was a critical mass of users, the program would actually do – the program would initially search social networks and come up with a random selection from the thousands of people it identified with that interest. These would then appear with the ‘Take my Bait?' tagline under their screen-grab. Obviously they had never asked to meet anyone, so if they were sent a message taking the Bait they didn't know they had sent, a tagline was added above the message that wasn't visible to the sender:
Fishbowll is a great new place to meet people from around the world who share your interests
. [SENDER'S NAME]
from
[
C
OUNTRY]
thinks it would be cool to chat with you because
[HE] [SHE]
is interested in
[INTEREST THE SENDER SPECIFIED]
and has heard that you are too. Register on Fishbowll and talk to
[HIM] [HER]
today
. Next to this would be a Register Now button that would direct the user to the Fishbowll registration page, following which a screen would appear with the sender's home page and a message box.

In short, each of the people communicating would be under the impression that it was the other who had wanted to communicate with them first.

Obviously, out of the ensuing conversations between the two people, it might emerge that this piece of engineering had taken place, but Andrei imagined that in many cases it wouldn't and, if it did, would usually be put down to a glitch in the system. He knew there was a deceit involved, and Andrei thought hard about whether it was justifiable. He was utterly convinced that if the site was going to work, people had to feel that the other people they encountered
wanted
to talk to them, and until he got the necessary number of users on the site, there was no other way to create that impression. Andrei believed that people would want the functionality he was developing, and if it took a slight deceit to introduce it to them in a form they would use, he decided that that was an acceptable compromise. He rationalized it as a small, necessary and excusable evil with the potential to create more than enough good to outweigh
it. Besides, it was a temporary measure. Once the site took off, he would be able to identify people who really did want to send a Bait.

Andrei had all kinds of ideas for ways to refine and improve the site as it grew and as user data began to come in, and he knew that a whole series of other ideas would occur to him as those ideas were put into practice. But there was one other element that was built into the design of the site from the start. Retained from the first version of Fishbowll, it was perhaps the feature that would turn out to be the most important thing about the site after the ‘Take my Bait?' concept itself. Any kind of interaction was captured and stored. When two people connected on Fishbowll, even if they were accessing it through their social networking home pages, everything they subsequently did with each other – their chat, the pictures they posted, the videos they sent – was held on Fishbowll servers.

Andrei's motivation in doing this was to ensure that Fishbowll could always produce the most relevant and current view of a person's interests. But it also meant that, in theory, everything a user ever said or did could be retained, archived, and searched.

There was no specific rule against the experiment that Kevin and Ben had carried out on Dan Cooley – but it was a clear breach of the Fundamental Standard, the two-line statement of general personal responsibility that governed student life at Stanford. In extreme cases, a breach of the Standard constituted grounds for expulsion from the university. The Office for Judicial Affairs, which had oversight of student discipline, regarded any alleged infraction with the utmost seriousness.

As Andrei immersed himself in the reconstruction of Fishbowll, events moved quickly against Kevin and Ben. Only a week after Dan Cooley was found wearing Adidas sneakers in Ricker dining hall, a disciplinary board was convened to consider the case.

It was clear that Kevin would have to take the lion's share of the blame. It was his computer that had been used: he had set up the account, he had typed every keystroke, had posted every
picture and had carried out a number of frankly illegal acts of hacking, which, if discovered, would leave the board no choice but to involve the police. There was only one way for Kevin to partially exonerate himself, and that would be to claim that Ben had told him what to do.

Kevin and Ben discussed this possibility and received the views of a number of other students – only some of which they sought. No one thought it would be a particularly smart move, not even for Kevin. Stanford was an elite institution and regarded itself very much as such. It seemed pretty certain that a Stanford disciplinary board would react worse to an apparently pliant and manipulable dupe who was unable to distinguish right from wrong when instructed by someone else than to a smart, self-motivated and curious junior who had gone a little too far in an innocent prank. If they were going to throw someone off campus, it was more likely to be a dupe than a prankster.

Kevin and Ben thus agreed that while Kevin took the blame for originating and executing the exercise, Ben would present as someone who knew from an early stage what was going on and, if guilty of anything, was guilty of not intervening to stop it. The board wouldn't take kindly to his moral failure, but the fact was that by the time the experiment came to an end most of Robinson House and quite a few people outside it had been guilty of the same lapse. Since the board, therefore, couldn't very well expel Ben without expelling a good percentage of the junior class with him, they thought this would protect him from the worst of the vice-provost's wrath. Kevin's fate would depend on the way he presented himself. Contrition was key.

A friend of Charles's had been up before a disciplinary board for a minor misdemeanour and they lured him to Robinson with promises of women and drink – only one of which eventuated – and got him to help out with a trial run. The night before the board, the common room resembled a lawyer's office the night before a trial, with Charles, his friend, Ben, and even Andrei breaking off from his Fishbowll coding to fire questions at Kevin.

It worked. Or perhaps some members of the board, guilty of a student prank or two in their own student days, secretly admired Kevin for his skill and originality in mischief-making. They put him on probation, asked him to sign a pledge to refrain from accessing any social networking sites for the next twelve months, and required that he see a counsellor. Ben, who felt chastened by the experience and wondered how he could have lost his moral compass to such an extent as to have allowed himself to get involved, received a stern rebuke but was let off without formal punishment.

Both of them were also required to apologise to Dan Cooley in front of one of the university officers and to hear his account of how the experience had affected him. Ben had already sought Cooley out to offer an apology.

It was about the best they could have hoped for. That night, Kevin organized a party in the suite. The whiff of alcohol soon attracted a crowd and the party spilled out of the door. Through it all, Andrei sat at his computer, headphones on his ears, in the last stages of coding. The building could have gone down around his head and he would have carried on tapping.

With a flurry of final touches, Fishbowll 2.0 was ready.

At around 2 a.m. that night, in early November, as the party was winding down around him, Andrei pressed the button to go live. He sent a message to his friends and acquaintances telling them about the new Fishbowll and asking them to try it again.

Then he opened the site once more, just to see what it would look like to someone who had never visited it before. A simple, uncluttered login page appeared in front of him.

WELCOME TO FISHBOWLL

A dating site for the mind