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