By Dario Cavallaro · Published · Updated
SixDegrees: a social network ahead of its audience.
SixDegrees combined profiles and friend lists in 1997, years before those features became routine. Many of the people its users knew were still offline. By 2000, the service had closed. The idea arrived before enough of someone’s actual network could join them there.
1997: putting the connections on the page
SixDegrees.com launched in 1997 with profiles and friend lists. In 1998, users could browse those lists. People had already socialised through earlier online services; making relationships visible and navigable brought a different structure to the experience.
A friend list could show how you knew someone, or how a stranger was connected to you. Browsing those lists made the relationships themselves part of the product.
Was SixDegrees really the first social network?
In their 2007 history of social network sites, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison identify SixDegrees as the first recognisable example under a particular definition: profiles, explicit connections and the ability to explore those connections. Earlier services had individual elements. SixDegrees combined them.
2000: the service closes, the idea continues
The researchers report that SixDegrees failed to become a sustainable business and closed in 2000. Many users did not yet have extended friendship networks online, and some found little to do after accepting requests. In a 2007 interview cited by the paper, founder A. Weinreich described the service as ahead of its time.
That is a retrospective explanation, rather than proof that timing alone caused the closure. The product could make a connection visible. It could not make someone’s friends join, or automatically give them an enjoyable next visit.
Later social networks made profile creation and friend requests routine. SixDegrees had already combined those features, but the people users knew were often still offline. A visible network was less useful when so much of someone’s actual network was missing.
The idea needed people who could use it
A network depends on more than the people who register first. Someone might understand the product and still find few of their friends there. SixDegrees could show connections, but the conditions that would make those connections useful were still developing.
That is the point I take from its history: an idea can make sense before the audience is ready to use it together. Later success with similar features does not prove that the earlier service could have survived. It does make dismissing the original idea as simply wrong too easy.
For someone starting a community today, the timing question is concrete. Are the people you want to bring together already online, able to join and looking for that conversation? A convincing concept cannot answer those questions for them.
The original SixDegrees carousel is part of Digital Shifts Past. Orkut’s later history follows a network whose communities had become established before its owner closed the service.