Imagine being an Internet user browsing the Web in the late 1990s, when most people are still trying to understand what the Internet really is. Connections are slow, computers are cumbersome, and digital communication is mainly made up of emails and forums for nerds, passionate about the most disparate topics. The idea that the Internet could become a space in which to map personal relationships and stay in touch with dozens of other people was still a futuristic concept. Yet it is precisely in this context that, way back in 1997, a certain Andrew Weinreich set up SixDegrees.com, considered the first true social network. If today we are used to creating profiles, adding contacts, exchanging private messages and seeing how people are connected to each other, it is because Weinreich’s idea made its way to platforms far more fortunate than his, including MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.
SixDegrees put into practice the theory of “six degrees of separation”, according to which any person is connected to any other through a chain of knowledge no more than six steps long, involving no more than five intermediaries, formulated by the Hungarian psychologist Frigyes Karinthy. It was not just a portal for communicating, but a system designed to digitally represent the social network of the user’s interpersonal relationships. His goal was not to entertain the public with mass content, but to focus on the bond that exists between multiple individuals. A “pure” social network, which had social relationships at the center of everything: a concept from which modern social networks are moving further and further away, given that the content and not one’s contacts are at the center of everything today. Let’s retrace together the history of SixDegrees, the first social network.
SixDegrees was born in 1997 and the first social network closed in 2000
The site was created by entrepreneur Andrew Weinreich, who in 1996 founded a company called MacroView, later renamed SixDegrees Inc., based in New York. The service became active the following year, in 1997, and offered features that were futuristic for the time, but which today seem completely obvious to us: the possibility of creating a personal profile, having a list of contacts, inviting contacts from outside your circle, exchanging messages with other users, etc. An interesting feature was that even people who didn’t register could still partially interact, receiving email updates and invitations to join the network. The site also allowed you to see not only direct contacts (first degree), but also the contacts of friends and friends of friends (second and third degree), visually highlighting how it was possible to reach anyone through just a few steps. At its peak, SixDegrees had around 3.5 million registered users and a team of around a hundred employees: numbers which, for the time, were very respectable.
In explaining the initial success that his creation had, in an interview given in 1998 to The Dallas Morning NewsAndrew Weinreich explained:
If you think about the things that are most successful on the Internet, they are those that replicate something that already works (in the real world, Ed.). We know that networking works between people. We (at SixDegrees, Ed.) simply make it more efficient.
However, this growth did not translate into a stable economic model. In December 1999 the site was purchased by YouthStream Media Networks for around 125 million dollars, but (also) due to the so-called “dot-com bubble” – the financial collapse that involved many companies linked to the Internet – the social network soon came to a close in 2000. SixDegrees had arrived too soon: the public was still unaccustomed to investing time in stable digital relationships and the technology was not ready to support always active and connected communities.
The legacy left by SixDegrees and the social world today
Despite its passing, the idea at the heart of SixDegrees has not been lost. In the early 2000s, platforms such as Friendster and MySpace revived the concept of social network that animated SixDegrees. Linkedin applied it to the professional world, allowing users to create networks of work contacts, while Facebook took it on a global scale, building increasingly sophisticated connection and sharing tools. With the arrival of Twitter (now
