The images contained in this post show the landing page and logo of the website Six Degrees.
Six Degrees as widely considered to be the first recognizable form of a social media platform. It got its name from the "six degrees of separation" theory, which claimed that anyone was connected to anyone else by six degrees of separation, meaning that you could reach anyone on the globe with the right chain of six people. It went live in 1997, but is believed to have been ahead of its time. Like many of today's networks, you could find friends and people with similar interests, as well as send messages put up bulletin boards for people in your first, second, and third degrees of connection. Users could also list friends and family members who weren't signed up on the network.
As one of the first websites to provide this kind of interface, Six Degrees came a little too early for internet users to appreciate its concept, and it was quickly drowned out by other, newer social networks after reaching a peak user count of approximately 3,500,000. Part of its failure is attributed to internet connections being much weaker across the board at the time, meaning that users had a very slow connection and the network couldn't effectively expand at the rate it needed to. In general, costs for internet broadband were also more expensive, making it a more expensive site to maintain. Its decision to send email advertisements to people unregistered family members and friends of users may have also contributed to its downfall. Six Degrees was taken offline in 2001, all while social media was really beginning to hit its stride as sites such as Friendster, MySpace, and finally Facebook were beginning to emerge on the web. Since then it is considered to have laid the foundation for those other social networks and has been re-uploaded on a new server at the link contained above.
