Adeola Adeyemo
Social media platforms as we know it today allows its users to post pictures and messages while interacting with each other using such shared content. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat are common names that come to mind when thinking of social media and how its users connect with each other. But long before these global networks were created was Six Degrees, a platform which is widely considered to be the very first social networking site.
Andrew Weinreich founded the site in May 1996 and launched it in 1997. Users on Six Degrees were allowed to create a profile, send messages and post bulletin board items to people in their first, second, and third degrees. They could also see their connection to any other user on the site while people who didn’t register as users could confirm friendships. The model of the website connected people to a Professional Network or allowed users start up a group of friends based on common interests. Users could browse lists of friends and view the web of connections their friends had with any other user on the site.
David Kirkpatrick in his book -The Facebook Effect, described Six Degrees as “the first online business that attempted to identify and map a set of real relationships between real people using their real names”. The name of the website originated from the ‘six degrees of separation’ theory which according to Wikipedia is: the idea that all living things and everything else in the world is six or fewer steps away from each other so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps.
By December 2000, the site was sold to YouthStream Media Networks for $125 million. It is widely reported that limited access to the internet during that period was one of the reasons why the site was not sustainable despite it having a peak user base of 3.5million. For a platform created in the age of dial up and AOL, limitations of internet connectivity meant it was an idea ahead of its time. Another shortcoming of the site is that many of the users felt that it wasn’t an interesting destination because their friends weren’t members. This limited the usage of the site to inviting and accepting friend requests.
At the close of the network in 2000, Weinreich said it had failed to truly take off as a successful business because it was too ahead of its time. Many individuals were beginning to use the internet however their networks were still limited as many of their friends were yet to start using it. The site therefore promoted growing a network of strangers into friends. Also, the usefulness and entertainment value of the site was very low as members could only use Instant Messaging after getting connected. This was a tool which was already being used with other networks at that time and so Six Degrees lacked any special appeal for its users.
The website of sixdegrees.com is still active, and it uses the tagline “The Most Exclusive Invite Only Social Network Where You Will Meet Amazing People Based on Your Interests”
