SixDegrees – Social Networking In Its Infancy

When most of us feel about online social networks, we most likely imagine about Fb. Fb is by far the most popular social networking website we have right now with 500 million Facebook users.

Having said that, Mark Zuckerberg was certainly not the to start with individual to ever have built a social network – he was just the initial to triumph in the way that he did.

In fact, one particular of the to start with social networks to actually take off, was named Sixdegrees.com.

It was established by Andrew Weinreich, a properly acknowledged entrepreneur & internet govt. Weinreich started his vocation doing work as a money analyst and just after a brief although, went again to college to study regulation. He worked as a legal expert for 2 years. It was during this time that he devised the idea of an on the web social community which made the procedure of “assembly men and women you really don’t know by the individuals you do know” additional productive.

It was in 1997 that he released Sixdegrees. At it is peak, the web-site had 3,500,000 people and 100 workforce. Weinreich later sold the website to Youthstream Media Networks in December 2000 for US$125 million. Weinreich is at this time the CEO of meetMoi – a location primarily based cellular dating services, as perfectly as the chairman of Xtify, a platform for geo-qualified cell messaging.

Sixdegrees was primarily based on the website of contacts variety of social networking. Weinreich drew his inspiration from the principle that each individual particular person in the planet is connected to each individual other person by not more than 6 measures, normally recognised as the the notion of “6 levels of separation”. It was also the initially social networking internet site to combine characteristics observed on other relationship web pages & group web sites into just one. Customers could build particular profiles, set up mate lists and surf good friend lists belonging to other consumers inside their community. They could send each other messages, affiliate by themselves with networks as effectively as deliver their family & pals invites to come to be customers of Sixdegrees.

Crafting this now in 2010, none of this appears that spectacular. Nonetheless, again in 1997, no other web page offered a mixture of these capabilities.

Sad to say, Sixdegrees did not past extremely very long, and it surely failed to leverage the level of popularity or help that a web page this sort of as Fb has today. There ended up a variety of reasons that contributed to the failure of this social community:

1) At the time, web technological innovation was not however designed to the issue where it was equipped to aid the functions that have been essential to make this form of software profitable

2) Despite their 3,500,000 registered people, Sixdegrees could not accumulate the amount of money of buyers necessary before their cash ran out

3) The characteristics readily available to Sixdegrees customers were not as participating as they could have been & failed to hold their end users coming back

4) Elements which ended up exterior of the company’s regulate had a harmful impact on it is really ability to make a income from on line promoting. These gatherings bundled a publish-April 2000 recession, as effectively as 9/11, and

5) The on the net advertising field was not experienced adequate to provide sufficient on-line advertisers to help their business enterprise design.

Variables 4 & 5 in all probability contributed the most to their downfall, even so, Sixdegrees marked the commencing of a new period in on-line conversation & networking. Even with it truly is short-lived achievement, it paved the way for the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and many additional.