SixDegrees.com launched in 1997, built by Andrew Weinreich’s New York company MacroView and named for the old claim that any two people are separated by no more than six handshakes. The site bet the web could make those handshakes visible. Members wrote profiles, listed the people they knew, and then something new happened: the site stitched those lists into a graph, mapped the path from any member to any other, and let messages travel two and three hops away.
A social graph typed by hand
The core object was the friend list, and it was assembled by hand. You listed friends, family, and acquaintances whether or not they had joined; names without profiles got email invites and occasional nudges. Confirmations became edges in a live map. Visit a stranger’s page and SixDegrees drew the chain of mutual acquaintances tying you to them — a directory of relationships instead of numbers. By the end of 1999 the service counted about three million registered members, and that December YouthStream Media Networks agreed to buy it for $125 million in stock.
The audience never showed up
The mechanics anticipated what Friendster and Facebook would do several years later, but a social network is only as useful as the number of people you actually know inside it. In the late 1990s that number was near zero for most members. Dial-up connections, no phone cameras, and only a fraction of households online meant your real friends mostly were not there. So second- and third-degree connections were strangers, and a short path to someone unknown is a curiosity, not a habit. Once the profile was written and the address book imported, there was little left to do. YouthStream could not turn the graph into revenue, and in December 2000 it announced the service would close at year’s end.
The graph waited for a crowd
SixDegrees failed in the right order, not the wrong one. Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook rebuilt the same social-circles machinery once enough people had broadband, cameras, and, most importantly, friends online. Weinreich himself moved on to a Wi-Fi startup, a mobile dating app, and the location firm Xtify, which IBM bought in 2013 — the founder was not the problem. The site is a ghost town that never got its crowd: the May 2000 snapshot survives in the Wayback Machine, while sixdegrees.com still resolves today and returns nothing but a gateway time-out. Timing is not a minor factor for a social graph; it is the factor. SixDegrees built the city grid before the population moved to town.