SixDegreescom

SixDegrees.com was an early online social networking service launched in 1997 by entrepreneur Andrew Weinreich. Widely regarded as one of the first platforms to resemble modern social networks, it aimed to map and leverage the social connections among users.

The site allowed members to create personal profiles, list their friends, and explore connections through friends of friends, drawing on the concept of six degrees of separation. By enabling users to browse social graphs and discover people through mutual acquaintances, SixDegrees.com popularized the idea that online networks could reflect real-world relationships.

In its development, SixDegrees.com attracted significant venture funding and attention in the late 1990s, positioning itself as a pioneer in social networking during the dot-com era. The service experimented with ways to monetize and grow its user base, but it faced the broader pressures of the market, rapid competition, and sustainability challenges common to many early internet startups.

The platform ceased operations in the early 2000s, with the exact year often cited as around 2000 to 2001 as the dot-com bubble collapsed. Despite its brief lifespan, SixDegrees.com is recognized for establishing many guiding ideas of social networking—most notably the social graph, user profiles, and the friend-based discovery model—that would later be realized by subsequent networks such as Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook.

Legacy and assessment: historians and technologists consider SixDegrees.com a foundational precursor to modern social networks, illustrating both the potential and the difficulties of building scalable online social graphs at the turn of the century.