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Not only did they want to connect with people – and this was the point he hadn’t got until somehow Ben’s words had flicked the switch in his head that had set off the explosion – they wanted to connect with people who wanted to connect with them .
    So how did you give them that experience? That was the question.
    Somehow, the answer was immediately there, as if it had been in his mind all along.
    Andrei got to work, coding effortlessly, completely in the zone. At some point Ben and Kevin came back to the common room. He was oblivious to them. After a while, they gave up trying to tell him what had happened with Dan Cooley, almost fearful of what might happen if they did manage to disturb him, as one might be fearful of waking a sleepwalker.
    Andrei kept the site simple and lean. When one opened Fishbowll as a user now, you were still asked what interests you wanted to share with others; you were still asked to choosebetween people from the whole world, a continent or a country. But then the site did something completely different. It asked whether you wanted to see the people who wanted to meet you, or whether you wanted to take a chance on seeing if anyone else wanted you to meet them.
    If you clicked on the first option, a screen came up showing reduced-size screen-grabs of nine people’s home pages. You could get a page view of the screen-grab by putting your cursor on the image. Under each image, in keeping with the piscine theme of the website, was a button saying, ‘Take my Bait?’ If you clicked on that, the home page enlarged to full screen, with a message box in the lower right corner to write to the other person.
    If you clicked on the second option, up came a screen of nine reduced-size screen-grabs to which you could send a ‘Take my Bait?’ message of your own.
    Andrei chose nine as the number of contacts, not out of any strict scientific rationale but because it seemed like the right kind of number – enough to give a meaty menu, but not too much to make it impossible to choose. A set of three by three screen-grabs also worked well on the screen. Every way he looked at it, this new format seemed to answer the objections everyone had raised. It was a selection of people – not a list of thousands. It made you feel wanted – these people had expressed a desire to meet someone just like you. It was the start of a journey – taking a Bait was the first step into the unknown.
    The coding was simple to do. Everything seemed to flow – vision, design, code. A couple of inspired wheelspins and it was done.
    But there was still a problem – no one was registered on the site, so there would be nobody to send Baits to anybody else. The first users who clicked on the option to meet the people who wanted to meet them would find … nobody. And if they found nobody, nobody would ever come back.
    So certain was Andrei that the site had to look as he now conceived it that he knew he had to come up with a solution. It turned out to be relatively simple. Rather than finding peoplewho had registered and actually expressed a desire to meet others with a similar interest – which, one day, when there was a critical mass of users, the program would actually do – the program would initially search social networks and come up with a random selection from the thousands of people it identified with that interest. These would then appear with the ‘Take my Bait?’ tagline under their screen-grab. Obviously they had never asked to meet anyone, so if they were sent a message taking the Bait they didn’t know they had sent, a tagline was added above the message that wasn’t visible to the sender: Fishbowll is a great new place to meet people from around the world who share your interests . [SENDER’S NAME] from [ C OUNTRY] thinks it would be cool to chat with you because [HE] [SHE] is interested in [INTEREST THE SENDER SPECIFIED] and has heard that