Fishbowl (3 page)

The problem was obvious, so obvious that Andrei couldn't believe he hadn't been struck by it before. If such people existed – not experts, not academics, not authorities on a subject, but smart, thoughtful people submerged in the general population who just happened to share one of your interests and might have something interesting to say about it – then how would you find them?

3

THE QUESTION GNAWED
at Andrei. He just couldn't let it go. The itch got stronger and stronger. Eventually, Andrei did the only thing he could do. He forgot about classes, he forgot about Sandy, he forgot about meals – and coded.

Days later, at the end of one final, stupendous wheelspin, Andrei took his headphones off, put them down beside his keyboard and looked around. The common room was empty. It was dark outside. He had no idea of the time and was only moderately certain he knew what day it was.

On the desk beside his computer stood a good number of empty Coke cans. Andrei pulled the ring on the last unopened one and put it to his lips.

He could hear the bubbling of the water in Ben's aquarium. He watched the fish as he sucked on the can, and felt the sweet, warm fizz of a Coke that had been out of the fridge way too long.

Some of the fish swam in the upper part of the tank, others in the lower part. It always struck Andrei how they layered. He watched one, an orange and white fish with a snub white nose, drift from one side of the tank to the other.

He needed a name. The website he had created was ready to go live. Between wheelspins over the last few days he had kept telling himself that he'd have time to think of a name but now the coding was done, and he still didn't have one.

The website was far from perfect. The search algorithm underlying it was crude, at best. And there was a list of about a hundred other improvements he could make and features he could add. But
the core of it was done, enough to show the concept, and if people didn't like it, there would be no point in spending the time doing any of the other things he had in mind.

But he had to have a name. He couldn't launch without one.

Andrei's gaze moved around the room. It was worse than a pigsty. He wondered for a moment how come the trash didn't pile up so high that it physically submerged them. Presumably someone cleared it out from time to time. Who? He knew that he had never done it.

He began to scrunch up the Coke cans. He finished the one he was drinking and scrunched that as well.

He was hungry and exhausted, as he always was after a wheelspin. He wanted to launch this thing and then go and get something to eat and maybe grab a couple of hours of sleep or go to a class and then come back to the computer and see what had happened, see if anyone had taken a look at the site and what they had to say.

He had to have a name.

Andrei found himself gazing at the aquarium again. He watched the orange and white fish. Or maybe it was a different one. There were at least four in there that he could see, now that he checked. They all swam somewhere between the middle and the upper part of the tank. Were they even aware of the fish that stayed at the bottom?

Suddenly their predicament seemed to be a metaphor for the problem he was trying to solve. Maybe it was all the caffeine and the sugar in the Coke speaking, but, in Andrei's mind, there was an uncanny parallel that had the almost unreal crystal clarity of an idea conceived by a mind that had had way too little sleep. It may have been only a four feet by three aquarium on the other side of the room, but it was a microcosm. The fish swam around in different layers, sharing the same water with the bits of pizza and chicken nuggets raining down on them from above – but did any of them know that the others in the other layers even existed? Some swam above, others below. Separate existences in a common
world. What if the orange and white fish could have spoken to the little grey fish that always seemed to be drifting around amongst the various objects embedded in the sand? Wouldn't each have had things to say, perspectives to share, which would have amazed the other? What was it like to look up all the time? What was it like to look down? But how could they communicate, even if they wanted to? How could they exchange ideas and insights and … OK, they were fish. You could draw the analogy too far. But as the fish were to the aquarium, so were people to the world.

But the name? Aquarium?
Aquarium.com
? It was flat. It had no ring to it.

Then it hit him. Fishbowl.

Fishbowl
.

Somehow, it was perfect.

Only one thing wasn't. Andrei did a search and found that the domain name was taken under every suffix he might conceivably use: TheFishbowl was taken as well. So was AFishbowl. Now that Andrei had hit on it, he felt as if he had always had that name in mind. Nothing else could capture the concept he wanted to express. He had to have it, without paying the tens of thousands or even more it might take to buy it, and without waiting the weeks or months it might take to negotiate for it. He wanted it right now. He was ready to launch.

He went quickly back to the domain name search box and searched the suffixes again. Impulsively, he added a second ‘l' to the name.
Fishbowll.com
. He did a search. No one had it! A minute later, he had registered it.

His fingers could barely keep pace with his mind now. They flew over the keyboard. He hit a key – and the site was live.

‘Check out this new website I've just launched,' he wrote to his email address book. ‘
Fishbowll.com
. That's right, you didn't misread. It's got two l's at the end. If you like it, let other people know.' He hit Send, then he shut down and looked around, alone in the common room. He jumped up and went to his room. Ben Marks was snoring. He opened the door of the other bedroom.
Kevin and Charles were both asleep. He was too excited to stay still. ‘Anyone want to go to Yao's?' he yelled.

There were groans.

‘Come on. I'm hungry.' He waited. ‘Guys. Come on! Yao's! Noodles! I'm buying.'

‘Dude,' came Kevin's voice, ‘do you have any idea what time it is?' There was a crash of something falling on the floor, then a rustling, and then Kevin's voice again. ‘It's six o'clock. I don't think Yao's is open.'

‘It's a list,' said Ben Marks that afternoon, after he had looked at the site.

Andrei nodded.

‘It's a list,' he said again. ‘Andrei, it's just a list.'

‘It's a list of just about everyone in the world,' said Andrei, with only mild exaggeration.

‘I know. It's amazing. I don't know how you did it.'

‘Do you want me to explain the algorithms?'

‘Do you think I'd understand?'

Andrei gazed at Ben for a moment. ‘No.'

Ben laughed. ‘Look, what I don't understand is, what am I supposed to do with it? How am I going to use it?'

Andrei looked at him uncomprehendingly. ‘You can find anyone you want. Anywhere in the world. Anyone with any interest you want to talk about.'

‘Dude,' said Kevin, waving an antique fly swat that had somehow found its way to the common room and now resided there. ‘I got eight hundred thousand names.'

‘Great!'

‘Yeah, but eight hundred thousand!'

‘What did you search on?'

‘Eggs.'

Ben laughed. ‘Kevin, you've got to get a life.'

‘I just wanted to see.'

‘But eggs?'

‘And you got eight hundred thousand people?' said Andrei. ‘That's awesome.'

‘The first name I clicked on was a guy in, like, Australia who's got some thing about caterpillar eggs. The next one was some woman in Canada who has this thing about swan eggs. Then there was the guy with this very kind of waxed beard who did something with quail eggs. Actually, the beard was quite interesting.'

‘Eggs is too general,' said Andrei. ‘You should have specified.'

‘Yeah, so that's what I did next. Goose eggs.'

Ben kicked his legs in amusement. ‘Goose eggs! Kevin, what is this sickness?'

‘And what happened then?' asked Andrei seriously.

‘Seventeen thousand.'

‘See?'

‘Seventeen
thousand
. Dude, seventeen thousand names. And they're not ranked, they're not ordered.'

‘You can search by country.'

‘At least let me know who's hot.'

‘How am I going to do that?'

Kevin shrugged. ‘Do something with their pictures so I don't get the guy with the beard every time.'

Andrei frowned. ‘So you're both saying … you get too much?'

‘Way too much,' said Ben. ‘Too much choice. You know the classic experiment – show someone six brands of jelly, and they'll choose. Show them twenty-four, and they're paralysed. I look at this thing … I don't know where to start. I don't know
how
to start.'

‘Start from the top.'

‘But there's no ranking. Is that a ranking, the order?'

Andrei shook his head. ‘The order's random.'

‘Then why don't I start from the bottom?'

‘You could.'

‘Or from the middle?'

‘You can start where you like.'

‘That's the problem!'

Andrei frowned again. ‘You think it needs to be ranked?'

‘You need something,' said Ben. ‘I don't know if it's a ranking but … something.'

Kevin beat the fly swat thoughtfully on the armrest of his chair. ‘Dude, you've got to do something. There's no way into this thing. You've got this list. A gazillion people. It's scares the shit out of me. It's fucking awesome.'

‘I think you mean awe-inspiring,' said Ben. ‘As in dread.'

‘Exactly. I'm in dread.' He looked at Ben. ‘Is that a word?'

‘I don't know.'

Andrei looked over at Sandy Gross, who was sitting on his desk, shaking her head. Andrei had neglected her completely once he had started coding, but she had taken the arrival of the email announcing Fishbowll's launch as a sign that he had surfaced from his wheelspin and had come to see him, only to find that he could think of nothing but his new website and how people were reacting to it.

‘You too?' asked Andrei.

‘I might use this for a sociology project,' said Sandy. ‘Once.'

‘So you wouldn't log in again?'

‘Not unless you were paying me.'

Andrei frowned. Fishbowll didn't have the capability to do a ranking of the names that came up, at least not yet. He had thought of developing a ranking algorithm but had decided against it. Not because he couldn't do it – there were a couple of ways he could think of to provide a ranking, although both would require a vast amount of programming time and considerably more server space than he had available. No, there was another reason. If he gave a ranked list, the same few names would get clicked on each time, and most likely they would be recognized experts in their field – names anyone could find by doing a crude internet search. That wasn't the vision he had for the site. He wanted it to be a place where you would find Guy from Colombia. A place where you could expand your experience, a place where you would discover people you would never otherwise come across, people who shared your interests but from whom you
could also learn about other practices, places, cultures, norms. People with amusing waxed beards, for example.

In order to do this, what Andrei had built was a lean, compact website, with no fuss or fanfare, in keeping with his lean and compact programming style. It consisted of a total of three pages.

The login page was simple and uncluttered. ‘Fishbowll,' it said, ‘is a place where you can meet people anywhere in the world to connect about the things that really interest you. These may be interests you already have or interests you want to find out about. Go ahead and try. In the Fishbowll, the world's your oyster.' At the bottom of the page was a button that said, ‘I want to connect.'

When you clicked on the button, a second page came up. It asked you to type in the interest you were looking for. The bottom half of the screen gave you the option to search the world, by continent, or by country. Below that was a Go button. Click on that, and, once the search was done, the resulting list appeared on a third page with up to a hundred names – or a series of pages, considering the thousands of names the searches generated. Each person on the list was identified by name and country. Click on a name, and you were directed to their home page in whichever social networking site they used. What you did then was up to you.

Behind this deceptively simple façade – when you clicked on the Go button – you activated a program that scanned every social networking site of any significance globally, in order to produce a list of people who self-identified as having your chosen interest. But if that was all that it did, the program would have been only a minor advance on search facilities that already existed, adding quantity but not quality to the results. The unique part of Fishbowll, the truly brilliant innovation that Andrei Koss had produced in a breathtaking frenzy of technical creativity – which would later be improved, refined, expanded, but would always remain at the heart of the website – was a set of algorithms that identified, from a person's home page and every other accessible piece of information about them, the top three things they really cared about – not from what they listed as their
interests, but from the content of their activities. It identified the things they talked about, posted pictures about, argued about, inquired about. The list that resulted was of people who were genuinely committed to the interest you had typed in, tested not by what they claimed – for whatever reason – that they were interested in, but by what they had actually
shown
they were interested in.

Andrei also ensured that any interaction people would have through Fishbowll would be captured and stored on the website's server so the program could continuously refine and update its identification of their interests.

But it had to be a site people wanted to use, and from the reaction of the people sitting in the room it didn't look promising.

By the end of the first day, about forty people had registered on the site – either friends of Andrei or friends of friends. And he was getting the same message from them.
Thousands of names. Great. Now what am I meant to do with this thing?