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

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.