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