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.
If he had given the number, Stanford would have discovered that after six short weeks Fishbowll had grown from the tame little creature Andrei Koss had launched on the world into a beast with a staggering 600,000 registered users, of whom an eye-watering 92 per cent visited the site on a daily basis.
The suite broke up for Winter Break. Charles Gok, for whom Fishbowll was merely a distraction as he made his way through the increasingly crowded common room to and from the physics lab each day, only had to travel as far as Los Angeles. Kevin went home to Chicago. Ben went back to New Jersey. Andrei got on a plane to Boston.
As the plane took off, Andrei felt something inside him take off as well. Maybe it was watching things grow smaller on the ground, but suddenly he felt himself looking at what he had done over the past couple of months as if from a height. Things had been happening so fast and with such intensity that he had had no time to try to understand it all. He had sat the exams for the Fall Quarter on the back of a couple of nights of intense cramming, and he knew his grades weren’t going to be what they should have been. He really needed to think.
He decided that for the next two weeks he wasn’t going to do any work on Fishbowll. He was going to step back and try to understand this thing he had created and which, in a few short weeks, seemed to have taken over his life.
And it wasn’t only time that Fishbowll was taking, it was money. The site was chronically short of server space and there was only so much he could do by streamlining the architecture. He had already put in most of the savings he had in the bank from selling his app. If Fishbowll’s growth continued at anything like the rate it was showing, a significant additional investment in server capacity would be required merely to keep it standing.
Back home, he told his parents about Fishbowll for the first time. His brother and sister were visiting for the holidays as well. He showed them the website. When he opened it, his sister, Dina, who was doing a PhD in chemical engineering at Princeton, started laughing. ‘That’s yours?’ she said.
Andrei bristled a little, wondering what was so funny.
‘I joined up last week.’ Dina grinned. ‘Leo,’ he said to their brother, ‘have you joined yet?’
Leo shook his head.
‘What do you guys at Wharton do all day? Come on, this is the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.’ She turned back to Andrei. ‘It’s yours? You really wrote this thing?’
Andrei nodded, still not sure if Dina was pulling his leg.
‘Mom, Dad, this thing’s unbelievable. You’ve got to take a look at it. How many users have you got, Andrei?’
Andrei shrugged. ‘Around half a million. A little more.’
‘Half a million?’ said Leo. ‘In how long?’
Andrei shrugged again. ‘A couple of months.’
‘That’s unbelievable!’ said Leo.
Dina hit him on the arm. ‘See? Join up already!’
Andrei’s parents glanced at each other, wondering what their children were so excited about ‘You’re taking care of your school work, right?’ said Andrei’s father, waggling a finger at him.
‘Sure,’ said Andrei.
Naturally, Andrei couldn’t quite keep his hands off his keyboard over the holiday, and he used the opportunity to fix a few aspects of the site’s functionality that had been bugging him for a while. But he did force himself to step away and think about it as well. Dina and Leo wanted to know more about the site, how he had got the idea, how he had developed it, what plans he had for it. Andrei wished he could have answered the last question. He took long walks along the icy streets around his parents’ house in Brookline and tried to figure out what he had got himself into. Was Fishbowll a figment, a fancy, a programming whim, or, as he was beginning to feel, a revolutionary means of providing a radically deeper level of connection in a way that might change the world? Or was he just turning into a completely deluded fantasist?
As the old year ticked into the new, Fishbowll had 793,000 registered users. Three days later, Andrei was on a plane back to Stanford.
Even if he wanted to walk away from Fishbowll, or set it on the back burner while he concentrated on school, he wasn’t sure that he had the right to. He had offered it to people and they had taken it up. Almost a million of them. They depended on it now.
He could sell it and let someone else – someone with the time and the money that was needed for it – take it to the next level. Even now, with the growth curve it had generated, he might well get something for it, perhaps even a seven-figure sum. Not bad for half a semester’s work. He had school work to do and his future to think of, as his parents had reminded him, and just as a site’s user base could rapidly grow, so it could rapidly fall. He was lucky enough to be at one of the world’s great universities. He had a course to finish and he was barely more than halfway through it. He had neglected his studies badly since Fishbowll launched. If he kept going with it, he knew that Fishbowll was going to demand more of his time, not less.
And even if he wanted to keep going, was he the be
st person to do it? If Fishbowll had even a tenth of the importance that he believed it did, was he capable of building it as it needed to be built? And could he do it by himself?
As he flew went back to Stanford for the Winter Quarter, Andrei knew he had to make a decision. In fact, a number of decisions.
7
IT WAS KEVIN who organized the party to celebrate Fishbowll’s millionth user – if hauling a heap of alcohol into a dorm and letting it be known that there was going to be a party could be called organization. The user count ticked over to the magic seven digits about two hours after the party started. Kevin jumped on a desk and announced that it was a 63-year-old lady from Saskatchewan who was interested in Scottish terriers. There was silence. No one knew what to make of that. ‘I’m joking!’ yelled Kevin. ‘It’s an eighteen-year-old girl in Rio who wants to know about fellatio.’
By the time they woke up the next day, the user count had ticked up another couple of thousand, and the million milestone already felt as if it was in the past.
‘Let’s go to Yao’s,’ said Andrei.
‘For breakfast?’
‘Kevin,’ said Ben, ‘it’s twelve o’clock.’
They went to the noodle place. Andrei knew just about all the waiters by name. Lopez, a short Mexican waiter who had his arms piled with plates, nodded in the direction of a free table at the back.
‘I wanted to tell you guys something,’ said Andrei, after Lopez had taken their order and they were waiting for the food to arrive. ‘I’ve been to see a lawyer.’
Kevin glanced knowingly at Ben for a second, then looked back at Andrei. ‘You’re selling Fishbowll, aren’t you?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I knew you would,’ said Kevin.
‘Really? You think someone would buy it?’
‘Dude, are you serious?’
‘You think it’s that good?’
Fishbowl Page 5
