SixDegrees.com

» see sixdegrees.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

sixdegrees.com sat in the part of internet history people can read about but cannot personally remember. it launched in 1997, the year after andrew weinreich registered the holding company macroview in may 1996. the pitch was milgram's six-degrees theorem turned into a website: every user listed their first-degree contacts, the system stitched those lists into a graph, and you could query the network to find a path between yourself and a stranger through mutual friends. at the time this was a genuinely new use of the web. the prior generation of web community had been mailing lists and usenet groups. none of them had a friend graph as the underlying data structure.

growth came faster than the team expected. by 1999 sixdegrees had crossed 3 million registered members, all of them recruited through the now-standard mechanic of inviting the addresses in your email contact list. that mechanic was new in 1997. weinreich had patents on it. youthstream media networks bought the company in december 1999 for 125 million dollars, paying largely in stock at the local peak of the nasdaq bubble. the deal was a billboard moment for what social-network companies could be worth on paper. it would also turn out to be one of the most badly timed acquisitions of the bust.

i was not on sixdegrees.com. i was eleven when it launched and online from turkey on a 33.6k modem mostly through msn and turkish forums. an english-language us social network with no localization was outside any user funnel that reached me, and it would have been outside that funnel even if i had been twenty instead of eleven. what is interesting about sixdegrees is not whether anyone outside the us used it but the fact that it failed in 2000 with the same product shape that would let facebook clear a billion accounts a decade later. the model worked. the timing did not.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the postmortem ~

youthstream had bought sixdegrees as part of a roll-up of college-targeted media properties. the parent company was burning cash on its other holdings through 2000 and the social network was not generating ad revenue at any pace that could keep it open. there was no ad-targeting infrastructure to speak of, no cpm rate that justified the bandwidth bill, and no premium-feature ladder. when youthstream pulled the plug on december 30, 2000 the cited reason was that the site had become a financial liability the company could not subsidize through the bust. the network and its user data were shut down rather than spun off.

weinreich himself had moved on by then. he later said in interviews that sixdegrees was three to five years too early: the broadband penetration was not there yet, and the photo-upload behavior that drove engagement at friendster and myspace later was effectively impossible at scale on the dialup connections of 1999. the friend graph worked. the rest of the stack was missing.

~ the inheritance ~

every social network that came after sixdegrees inherited some piece of its mechanics. the friend list as a first-class object and the invite-your-contacts onboarding flow both ran first on sixdegrees in 1997 and 1998. friendster picked the same shape up in 2002 with a faster connection and richer profiles. myspace took it commercial in 2003 alongside the linkedin professional version of the same year. facebook launched its college version in 2004. by the time facebook went global in 2006 the friend graph was the assumed default of a social product, and everyone had forgotten where it came from.

weinreich's invite-by-email-contact patent ended up as a footnote in litigation between social networks in the late 2000s. youthstream relaunched a placeholder version of sixdegrees in 2010 that nobody used. the original site and the 3.5 million accounts that had been the entire first generation of recognizably modern social networking are gone. what survives is the shape they implied.

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