SixDegrees.com — The First Social Network, Born Too Early to Survive

Summary

SixDegrees.com was the first thing that looked like a social network, and it died before the world was ready for one. Launched in 1997 by the New York entrepreneur Andrew Weinreich and his company MacroView, it let users create a profile, list their friends, family, and acquaintances, and then traverse those connections outward — sending messages and seeing how they were linked to anyone else on the site, first degree to second to third. The name came from the "six degrees of separation" idea, and the concept was, in retrospect, exactly right: the profile, the friend list, the friends-of-friends graph. Every social network since has been a remix of what SixDegrees did first.

The numbers, for 1997, were genuinely large. At its peak the site had around 3.5 million fully registered members and close to 100 employees, and in December 1999 it was sold to YouthStream Media Networks for a reported $125 million — a headline price that, arriving near the top of the dot-com mania, made Weinreich a textbook example of selling at exactly the right moment. The patent he and his co-inventors filed on the underlying method, US Patent 6,175,831, would later be regarded as the foundational social-networking patent and was eventually bought up by companies including LinkedIn.

What SixDegrees could not buy was time. The technology and habits that make social networks work — broadband always-on connections, digital cameras and photos worth sharing, a critical mass of friends already online — did not yet exist in the late 1990s, so users built their networks and then found little to do in them. When the dot-com bubble burst, YouthStream's finances collapsed under it, and the site that had invented the category was wound down around 2000–2001, catalogued as shut by 2001. It was not outcompeted; nothing yet existed to compete with it. It was, in its founder's own diagnosis, simply too early — the right idea waiting roughly five years for the rest of the internet to arrive.

Timeline

The Idea That Was Right the First Time

What is striking about SixDegrees.com, looking back from the era of billion-user platforms, is how little it had to invent that later networks kept. Launched in 1997, it gave each user a profile, a list of the people they knew, and — the genuinely original part — the ability to travel along those connections: to message people in your first, second, and third degree, and to see how you were linked to any other member of the site. This was the social graph, years before the phrase existed. The premise, drawn from the "six degrees of separation" notion that any two people are connected through a short chain of acquaintances, was that your network was itself the product. Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook would each, in turn, rediscover that the network is the product. SixDegrees got there first.

It also grew. For the late-1990s internet — dial-up, slow, a fraction of the population online — roughly 3.5 million registered members was a real achievement, and the company staffed up to nearly 100 employees to match. Weinreich and his co-inventors were sufficiently aware of what they had built to patent the method; US Patent 6,175,831, granted in January 2000, would later be cited as the foundational social-networking patent. On paper, in 1999, SixDegrees was a pioneer with millions of users, a defensible patent, and the field entirely to itself.

The catch was hidden inside the registration numbers. People joined, built out their connections, and then arrived at a question the company could not yet answer: now what? With slow dial-up, no photos to speak of, and most of one's actual friends still offline, there was very little to do once the graph was built. The network existed; the activity did not. SixDegrees had assembled the skeleton of social media without the muscle the next decade would supply.

The $125 Million Exit and the Crash That Followed

In December 1999, near the giddy peak of the dot-com boom, MacroView's SixDegrees was sold to YouthStream Media Networks for a reported $125 million. For Weinreich, the timing could hardly have been better; for the acquirer, it could hardly have been worse. YouthStream was an advertising company built to monetize a young online audience, valued on attention and growth rather than profit. The $125 million reflected the market's late-1999 conviction that any large internet audience was about to become enormously valuable — a conviction that had roughly three months left to run.

When the dot-com bubble burst in March 2000, the logic that justified prices like $125 million evaporated almost overnight. Advertising-dependent internet firms watched their revenue assumptions and share prices collapse together, and YouthStream — having paid a fortune for an audience it had not yet figured out how to profit from — was caught directly in the wreckage. A social network with millions of lightly engaged users, no proven revenue model, and a parent now fighting for survival was not an asset anyone could afford to nurture through a downturn. It was overhead.

So SixDegrees was wound down. The site ceased meaningful operation around the end of 2000 and is catalogued as shut by 2001 — the first social network and, for a while, the first dead one. (A service later operated under a similar name, which is why some accounts speak of it being "brought back"; the original SixDegrees of 1997–2001 is the one that mattered and the one that died here.) It had not lost to a competitor, because in 1997–2000 it had none worth the name. It had lost to the calendar and the macro-economy at once.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

SixDegrees left behind almost no grieving community — its users had never had much to do there — but it left an outsized intellectual legacy. Every feature it pioneered became standard equipment: the profile, the articulated friend list, the traversable graph of friends-of-friends. When Friendster appeared in 2002, then MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook, they were not inventing the social network so much as building it again, this time onto an internet that finally had the cameras, the bandwidth, and the population to support it. SixDegrees is the entry against which every later "first" claim is checked and the place the whole genre's lineage begins.

The patent, US 6,175,831, had a second life of its own: regarded as the definitive social-networking patent, it changed hands over the years and was acquired by companies in the space, including LinkedIn — a reminder that even a dead pioneer's paperwork can outlive the product by a decade. And Weinreich became something rarer than a successful founder: a credible witness to his own failure, repeatedly explaining that the company's only real mistake was the date on the calendar. SixDegrees is the origin point of this encyclopedia's Unfriended wing — the first social network, the first to die, and the cleanest case ever filed of an idea that was simply, fatally early.

Lessons

References

• SixDegrees.com Wikipedia
• The father of social networking — with Andrew Weinreich Mixergy
• Six Degrees patent Wikipedia
• SixDegrees.com — The Start of Social Media Medium