6nergies.net

» see 6nergies.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

6nergies.net ran its entire life inside my university years and never once crossed into them. It was French and it was a professional network, and in Turkey between 2004 and 2008 the professional network was not a category anybody had yet been offered.

Alain Lefebvre started it in 2004 and it is generally credited as the first professional social network in France. He had co-founded SQLI in 1990 and run it for more than a decade before this, so it arrived with a working adult behind it rather than a dorm room. The name is six plus energies, after Stanley Milgram's finding that a message reaches a stranger through roughly six intermediaries. Six people, six links.

By 2007 there were more than 20,000 members. The service did cross-linking between profiles and a microblogging feature the site called Social Signal, and there was an interface to Facebook by the end. It carried no advertising at all, which was a stated position rather than an oversight.

The company underneath was Artracing, based at Le Bourget du Lac, with a second entity called 6nergies AC SAS created in December 2005. Artracing was liquidated on 23 June 2008. The site did not go dark that day. The homepage kept serving, unchanged, for about another year before it finally became a redirect, which is a slower and lonelier ending than a farewell post.

What I had instead in those years was a department and a mailing list. A Turkish engineering student's professional record in 2006 was a Word document you attached to an email, revised the night before you needed it and otherwise not thought about at all. The idea that you should keep a public page about your working life, updated continuously, in case somebody you had not met yet came looking, reached here later and reached here as LinkedIn. 6nergies was making that argument several years early to an audience that had not asked for it either.

~ the record ~

~ what six degrees was supposed to buy you ~

The premise of every professional network of that generation was that the chain from you to the person you needed is short, and the only reason you cannot walk it is that nobody has written the chain down. Write it down and the introduction becomes navigable. That is the promise the name was making before you read a word of the site.

In practice the chain is only short if everyone is already inside. A network of 20,000 French professionals is a large room and a tiny sample of French professional life, so the second degree resolves and the fourth does not. This is the problem that only one company in the category ever solved, and it solved it by being the one everybody joined rather than by being the one with the better idea about degrees.

~ ten thousand euros ~

The declared revenue for 2006 was 10,484 euros. Around 5,000 of that came from subscriptions, sold as membership of Club 6nergies at thirty euros a year, which works out to roughly 160 people paying. Twenty thousand members, a hundred and sixty of whom were paying for anything.

That ratio is not a scandal, it is the ordinary arithmetic of a free network with a voluntary tier bolted on. What it does mean is that the entire business was a bet on a funding round arriving before the members did. The round did not arrive. There was also an ambassadors club, eight founding members expanded to seventeen associate ambassadors by July 2006, which is the kind of structure you build when you are trying to manufacture the density the network does not have yet.

~ built in poland ~

The platform was developed offshore by Cleverage in Poland, at a stated saving of fifty percent against building it in France. In 2005 that was a modern decision and it was reported as one of the interesting things about the company.

It reads differently now. A social network is not a deliverable you commission and receive. It is a thing you keep rebuilding in response to what the members do inside it, and the loop between noticing a behavior and shipping against it is the actual product. Cutting the cost of the first build in half is only a saving if there is a second build, and a third.

~ nothing to take with you ~

The detail the French record keeps returning to is that 6nergies gave its users no way to save their data. Not a slow export, not an awkward one. There was no mechanism, so when the company was liquidated the connections that 20,000 people had spent four years accumulating simply stopped being anywhere.

Every network of that era had this hole and most of them were never asked about it, because most of them were bought rather than wound up. An acquisition moves the database and everybody keeps their contacts, and the question of who owns the graph never has to be answered out loud. A liquidation answers it. The graph belonged to the company, the company is gone, and the fact that each individual line in it described a relationship between two real people gave nobody any standing to keep a copy.

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