Fishbowl

by Matthew Glass

  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?

  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?’