Fishbowl by Matthew Glass Read Free Book Online Page B

fortnight after launch, 40,000 users were registered.
    Andrei watched the figures rising. Fishbowll was going viral.
    He analysed the numbers. On average, each user who sent a Bait did so to 3.1 people, of whom, on average, 2.2 registered and responded. Of the 2.2 who responded, 1.7 in turn sent their own Baits to new users within forty-eight hours. Fishbowll had all the hallmarks of exponential growth, in which each new user in turn helped attract more users to the site, fuelling a surge in usage.
    Every night Andrei checked the user numbers and yelled them out to whoever happened to be in the common room. Sometimes it was only to the fish in the aquarium, but not often. Kevin and Ben, with a Dan Cooley-sized hole in their leisure activities that was just waiting to be filled, soon became involved.
    They loved the site – so much so that they wondered whether the design really could have come from Andrei, who had never previously shown any insight into the features that would ring auser’s bell. But he had succeeded in doing that this time. The escalating user numbers proved it, as did the comments on Fishbowll that could be 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 inthe methodologies he didn’t know. But it wasn’t only dry statistical analysis that was needed.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜They can email us.’
    â€˜No, they need to talk to each other. They’re doing it anyway. They’ve set up pages on other networks.’
    â€˜That’s good.’
    â€˜No, it isn’t. They should be doing that on our network.’
    â€˜We’re not a network, Ben. We connect people on other networks.’
    â€˜Well, they want more. I spend hours searching