Fishbowl (5 page)

6

TWELVE HOURS AFTER
Fishbowll went live for the second time, seventy-five people had registered and Andrei was getting positive messages in his inbox. By the end of the second day after launch, there were 200 users on the site, three times the number that the first Fishbowll had ever achieved.

By now, Andrei knew, the circle of users must have spread beyond his friends and acquaintances. Fishbowll had floated out into the open ocean of cyberspace, where the fact that Andrei Koss had developed the site was no reason to look at it. By the weekend, the 1000-user mark had been breached. A fortnight after launch, 40,000 users were registered.

Andrei watched the figures rising. Fishbowll was going viral.

He analysed the numbers. On average, each user who sent a Bait did so to 3.1 people, of whom, on average, 2.2 registered and responded. Of the 2.2 who responded, 1.7 in turn sent their own Baits to new users within forty-eight hours. Fishbowll had all the hallmarks of exponential growth, in which each new user in turn helped attract more users to the site, fuelling a surge in usage.

Every night Andrei checked the user numbers and yelled them out to whoever happened to be in the common room. Sometimes it was only to the fish in the aquarium, but not often. Kevin and Ben, with a Dan Cooley-sized hole in their leisure activities that was just waiting to be filled, soon became involved.

They loved the site – so much so that they wondered whether the design really could have come from Andrei, who had never previously shown any insight into the features that would ring a
user's bell. But he had succeeded in doing that this time. The escalating user numbers proved it, as did the comments on Fishbowll that could be found in proliferating numbers by doing a simple internet search. On social networks, in chatrooms, in blogs, a small but growing group of fans was buzzing about Fishbowll. They loved the experience of finding others who shared their interests in places they would never have thought to look. They loved the idea of sending a ‘Bait' and getting ‘Hooked'. But there were other things they wanted. They wanted the site to produce better, more filtered Baits so they would end up with even more specific contacts. They wanted to be able to talk to more of those contacts than only one at a time. They wanted to be able to set up a Fishbowll home page that would be visible to others, which was something Andrei had never anticipated, imagining that people would continue to use their home pages on their existing social networks. And there were other demands. Everyone seemed to want a new functionality.

Andrei was wheelspinning as fast as he could just to keep the site running. With each step change in user numbers the program creaked, and its appetite for server space escalated. He was continuously coding to make the program more efficient. Sandy Gross would drop by, take one look at him sitting at his desk with his headphones on and a Coke in his hand, and leave without even bothering to try to catch his eye.

One night, Kevin pulled up a chair and asked if there was anything he could do, and Andrei was soon parcelling out chunks of coding to him. Wheelspins now involved the two of them sitting at screens at adjoining desks, headphones in ears, a slew of Coke cans on the floor between them, breaking off only to crunch a problem and then get back to work. In the meantime, huge amounts of data were being generated about user behaviour, which would have been invaluable if only someone had had the time to analyse it.

Ben didn't know much about programming, but he had a year of statistical techniques for his psychology major under his belt, and he was more than capable of giving himself a crash course in
the methodologies he didn't know. But it wasn't only dry statistical analysis that was needed.

‘We need a community,' Ben said to Andrei, soon after he got involved.

Andrei looked at him blankly. ‘It's a dating site for the mind, Ben. We bring people together, we don't shepherd them.'

Ben shrugged. ‘The users need a place to talk about the site.'

‘They can email us.'

‘No, they need to talk to each other. They're doing it anyway. They've set up pages on other networks.'

‘That's good.'

‘No, it isn't. They should be doing that on our network.'

‘We're not a network, Ben. We connect people on other networks.'

‘Well, they want more. I spend hours searching for their comments in all kinds of places.'

‘You haven't done too badly.'

‘There's stuff I'm not hearing because I don't happen to come across it. Why should we deprive someone of their right to be heard because I don't happen to type in the right set of keywords?'

Andrei looked at Ben thoughtfully.

‘They have a right to be heard, Andrei. And if they have a right to be heard, we have an obligation to provide a forum for them to speak.'

‘Yeah,' said Kevin, toying with the communal fly swat. ‘And it will give them a stake, make them feel involved. It builds loyalty.'

‘Plus,' said Ben, ‘when there's something they want, or something they don't like, we'll hear about it first.'

They talked about it. Every spare minute now, they talked about Fishbowll.

Andrei wasn't persuaded by Kevin's argument. Loyalty, he thought, would be a function of the efficiency and user experience offered by the site. If that wasn't enough to make people want to come back, he didn't want to try to lure them by offering some kind of false sense of community. And he didn't think that
would work anyway, not for long. But what Ben had said gave him pause. It was a serious point. What responsibility did he owe to his users? Less than a month in, there were over a quarter of a million of them now. Andrei's idea had been for a slim, functional site where people found other people – and that was it. He hadn't looked beyond that. But over the past couple of weeks he had had a growing feeling that this vision wasn't adequate for the beast that Fishbowll was becoming, and that the responsibility he had assumed in putting Fishbowll into the world was far greater than the responsibility of writing a piece of code and putting a user interface in front of it. He hadn't thought it through – hadn't had the time – and he didn't know what shape that responsibility would take or how far it would extend. In fact, there was something scary about even contemplating it. He hadn't anticipated this, but he knew he couldn't simply ignore it.

Sandy agreed with Ben. Some kind of community space on the site was needed. Andrei listened to her carefully. The female mind, he felt, was a closed book to him, and Sandy was about his only way of getting a peek inside. Only 38 per cent of his users were female. That wasn't high enough. He needed to understand what they wanted – he needed to understand what everyone wanted.

‘All right,' he said to Ben, eventually. ‘How would this community work?'

Ben shrugged. ‘We'd have, like, a discussion page, I guess, where anyone could log their comments.'

‘Once we start, they'll tell us how they want it done,' said Kevin. ‘Let's listen to them. Dude, we're not trying to control what they do. This isn't Apple, right?'

Andrei grimaced.

‘Exactly.' Kevin thought of himself as a libertarian and got on his high horse at the first whiff of control. ‘Let's listen to the users. We should give them anything they want as long as nothing we do makes the world a worse place.'

‘OK, let's give them a place to talk,' said Andrei. ‘See if they want it. If they want it, we'll build it out. Let's do it.'

‘What do we call it?' asked Ben.

‘Good question.'

Andrei looked at the aquarium that had inspired the name of Fishbowll in the first place. On the sand at the bottom, in amongst the seaweed, was a scattering of objects for the fish to swim around. Some of them were the conventional things usually found in fishbowls, like a miniature wreck, and some were not so conventional, like a tourist model of the Golden Gate Bridge that someone had tossed into the water while Ben wasn't looking. Amongst the conventional items was a cave made out of some kind of brown stone.

‘The Grotto,' said Andrei, still gazing at the aquarium. He looked up. ‘You live in the fishbowl. You want to talk to your peers, dive down to the grotto.'

‘Cool,' said Kevin.

Over the next couple of nights, Andrei created the Grotto. He announced its launch on Thanksgiving morning with a message on the Fishbowll login page. Within hours, it was unusable because of the sheer number of people trying to get into it.

The technical issues surrounding the Grotto were soon solved. Andrei dug into his savings – even further into his savings – to rent more server space. But it soon became apparent that having the Grotto wasn't as simple as Ben had suggested. Someone had to tend to it. It wasn't only comments that were posted there – questions turned up, suggestions, demands for a response from Fishbowll. A group of early Fishbowll users soon came to inhabit it, spending what seemed to be all of their time there. They were passionate and demanding about the site.

Andrei didn't have time to spend in the Grotto, and neither did Kevin, who was more often than not wheelspinning beside him. Imperceptibly, Ben became Grotto Captain and the online spokesman for Fishbowll. Complaints came in about users abusing others in the Grotto. Ben asked Andrei if he wanted to write a user policy. Andrei, heading into a wheelspin, asked if Ben
could do it. Ben researched the user policies of half a dozen social networks and produced a Fishbowll version. Next came demands for a privacy policy, and Ben wrote that as well.

Out of the Grotto gushed streams of ideas for improvements and additional functionality for the website. Andrei, Ben and Kevin, whose class attendance time had plummeted, would spend hours in the common room debating them.

In the end, everything had to get past Andrei. His objective was to empower people to connect in the most efficient way possible. Out of this objective grew two technical tests that any new idea had to pass: simplicity and connection. Alongside these, a third test evolved informally in the long discussions in the common room: not making the world a worse place. As long as a suggested functionality didn't reduce simplicity and connection or manifestly make the world a worse place, Andrei was prepared to consider it. Allied to this philosophy of inclusiveness, one of the defining characteristics of the early Fishbowll was a willingness to allow users a meaningful voice in influencing the development of the site, an approach supported especially strongly by Kevin.

The first couple of months of Fishbowll's existence saw some of the other classic features of the website created. The demand from the Grotto to have home pages on Fishbowll was overwhelming, and this capability was soon provided. The functionality to set up group pages – or Schools, as they were named, in keeping with the fish theme that was now running through the naming of everything on the site – was also developed, as was the ability to nominate oneself as a ‘Fish' of someone else, receiving all posts relating to the shared interest that person made. This soon led to each person seeing on their website: ‘How many Fish do I have in my Net?'

Kevin wanted this score to be publicly visible. ‘Dude, we could give titles!' he said. ‘Like, if you've got a hundred fish, you're a snapper. And if you've got a thousand fish, you're a tuna.'

‘A tuna?' said Ben.

‘Tuna are awesome fish. And if you've got ten thousand fish, you're a marlin. And if you've got a hundred thousand fish, you're a … great white!'

‘A predator?'

‘Dude. A hundred thousand fish. That's a great white.'

‘Some people might see that as racist,' said Ben.

‘Come on. A great white shark? Everyone loves great whites!'

Andrei held back from making the numbers visible to others, much less creating a category of predators with three rows of teeth. He feared it would evolve into a form of ranking by another name, and ranking was something he had avoided from the start.

To aid connection, he still wanted the journey to begin in a fairly random way so that the users would find themselves talking to people they would never have found otherwise. Later, in response to a growing clamour in the Grotto for improved filtering, he would relent and create two options when people wanted to send a Bait: ‘Sorted' and ‘Go Fishing', so people had a choice between more specific or more general lists. As the search algorithms became more sophisticated, he added ‘Most Like' and ‘Most Unlike' Baits, so that people could contact others from similar or different backgrounds.

Fishbowll acquired a logo as well. A friend of Ben's who was majoring in art history had connected with a Panamanian guy who shared his interest in the silverpoint technique of the Flemish Renaissance artist Jan van Eyck: they were both doing a thesis on the very same drawing. Ben's friend had dropped by the suite to tell Andrei how much he loved the site and found himself hanging out, as a lot of other people did, while Andrei wheelspun at his desk. He picked up a pizza box and started doodling on the lid. Two hours later, the result was on the login page.

Stanford students were, naturally, big users of the site. By the end of the quarter, coming to watch Andrei wheelspinning in Robinson House had become almost a pilgrimage for the most enthusiastic of them. In its last issue before the undergraduate housing was closed for Winter Break and the student exodus
reached its peak, the
Stanford Daily
carried an article titled: ‘Is the next Next Big Thing happening right here in Sterling Quad?' The writer, a liberal arts major, came to the suite and Andrei broke off from his screen to answer a few questions.

It was obvious she didn't understand the technical details behind Fishbowl so he didn't talk about them. She asked how many users he had on the site. Andrei replied that he wanted to find a way to bring people together, and whether a thousand people or a million people wanted to use the website, as long as some people found it useful, it was fine with him.