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