Sixdegrees.com: A Social Media Origin Story

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio

0:15Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, here's Jerry and we're going to take a nice little stroll down internet memory lane here on Stuff You Should Know Yeah, this is something I had never heard of. Had you heard of this? No. I ran it past Yumi and she's like, oh, man, yes, I think I've heard of it. And I don't know if she has or not. Well, Yumi is an early adopter. Yeah, she was definitely more internety than I was at that time. Yeah. So what we're talking about here is the first what's regarded as the first social media website, the thing that started the degradation of all mankind way back in 1997.

0:54It was called six degrees dot com spelled out S.I.X. degrees dot com. It was founded by a guy named Andrew Weinreich. And for about three years in the late 90s, they were able to come online when not a ton of people are online and garner ultimately about three and a half million users, which it pales in comparison to what we look at today. But for the time, wasn't too bad. Yeah, not too shabby. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to get them over the hump and give them staying power. But I think they were also a victim of timing, as we'll see. Yeah, for sure. But yes, the deck was stacked against them in the fact that they were essentially very much ahead of their time.

1:40They were a social media site before there were enough people online. Not just enough people to come and use your social media site. there was only something like, I mean, if they had three and a half million users, there's probably like 3.6 million users on all of the Internet at the time. I don't know if that's a correct estimate, but something like 18 percent of households, according to the U.S. Census, in 1997, when Six Degrees launched, only 18 percent had Internet at home at the time. Yeah, there's a there's a competing stat from Pew Research Center that said 36 percent did. but there was different methodologies and stuff.

2:21So let's just say, you know, somewhere in between those numbers, I bet it was more like 18. This was, you know, 97 was one, two, three, four, five years before Friendster launched. Friendster, that's hard to say for some reason. And but by that time, the percentage of people in 2002, that had flipped. It was more like 39 % of people did not use the internet and 61 % of people did. So it was right at that, you know, it was just terrible timing right there at the end of the 90s when the dot-com bubble burst and just right on its heels, other sites came along that did far, far better. Yeah, and just one thing, I like that Pew data because it doesn't have like that small slice of like, don't know, not sure.

3:09It's either, yes, I use it or I don't use it. It's a nice solid survey. Agreed. So, yeah, so there's a lot of what ifs, could have beens kind of thing. And we'll get into those a little bit more. But there were more things that Six Degrees was up against. Another really, really big one was the slow speed of Internet. Yeah. And, you know, today you might look back and think, well, we had no comparison back then. Didn't matter. It was so slow that it would make you angry waiting around for a song to download or a web page to even load. There were transfer speeds using dial-up modems of 56 kilobytes per second.

3:54That was what you had to deal with. Not a gig per second, a kilobyte times 56 per second. That was the transfer speed at the time. And that was the maximum. Yeah. I mean, we've laughed about it before, but just the days of just seeing a picture appear on the screen like three lines at a time, down, down, down. And you're just I just want to know what this thing looks like. And if you wanted to know, you had to sit there for five minutes or whatever. I mean, you had time to go make and eat toast while a picture was downloading. Yeah, I ate a lot of toast back then. So that was a that was a big challenge for it, too.

4:33And then one of the other problems, too, is we'll see is that people, I mean, if you have a social media site, it's kind of helpful to have pictures and they just weren't around at the time. Yeah. And we'll get to that, all the reasons why in a minute. But just to sort of, you know, locate it on the timeline. In 1997, when it launched, like Google.com had just registered as a domain. So it wasn't even a real thing yet. But the word weblog had just been coined or, you know, what it would become is blog. And Netflix was sending DVDs through the mail. So it seems like a thousand years ago, but it wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things.

5:14No. And it's kind of sad that Six Degrees has kind of gotten lost to history. Most people think Friendster was the first social media site. No, Six Degrees was. And it wasn't even one of those things where it's technically the first social media site, even though it really was not, it didn't resemble social media at all. No, this was the first social media site and it essentially laid the groundwork for all the social media sites to come. It just was so far ahead of its time that it got lost to history. Yeah, for sure. Friendster ultimately got about 10 million, but they had a lot of technical problems, so they didn't last.

5:51myspace was the next big one in 2003 they were the first to reach a million monthly active users which was a big deal some people say that at one point it was the most popular site in the united states i believe that yeah yeah even if only for a brief amount of time but then in 2008 facebook came along and sort of smashed everything and just to put a perspective three and a half million users for Six Degrees. Facebook has more than 3 billion users. And Blue Sky has 33 million, and that's looked at as like a tiny thing. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, it kind of puts their three and a half million users into perspective.

6:32Yeah. So Six Degrees may sound familiar to people. It's actually very much related to the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or Six Degrees of Separation, the play by John Guare, and then later the movie adaptation starring Stockard Channing, of course. But it's actually, I didn't realize, it's based on a study that Stanley Milgram of the very famous Milgram experiment, where he had people shock some unseen person in another room to find out just how obedient people were to authority, even against their own set of morals. You know that one, right? Yeah. He also carried out a study where he was one of the first to kind of determine how far apart the average person was from the other, from anybody else in the world.

7:23Yeah. He got together with another psych professor named Jeffrey Travers. And this is pretty cool. I think it was pretty lo-fi way to do it. But this is, I mean, what year was this? Was this the 1950s? No, it was the late 60s. Late 60s. Okay. But what they did was they said, all right, let's get some people in Kansas. Let's get some people in Nebraska. They said, here's a folder, and it has a document with a target person that we want you to get this to them. But you can't just look them up and see if you can find their address and mail it to them. One of the people was in Cambridge. One was in Sharon, Massachusetts.

8:01And they said, what you want to do or what we want you to do, rather, is send it to a person that you personally know who you think might be able to get it to another person who could get it to another person who could eventually get it to this target person. And then we will measure that and see what the average or the mean might be. So literally a farmer in Kansas got it, you know, this is just one example, got it to the wife of a student in Massachusetts who gave it to an Episcopalian minister in this town, who gave it to an instructor at the theological seminary there, who got it to that target.

8:39So that would be one, two, three, four degrees of separation, which is pretty remarkable, I think. Yeah, and I also think, Chuck, that it's kind of funny that to Stanley Milgram, Nebraska and Kansas are the most socially remote locations in all of the United States because that's where he started to see how long it took to get to, I guess, civilization like Boston. But they actually did a lot of analysis of this. They released a version of the study in Psychology Today, which was meant for a general audience. But then they did like the real deal in a journal called Sociometry in 1969. And they found that there was a mean length.

9:24Mean is the one in the middle. No, mean is average. It's another word for average. Just say average, you know, of 4.4 to 5.7 intermediaries. So they found that people have a degree of separation of 4.4 to 5.7. And this was all the way back in the mid to late 60s. Think about how closer we are now. Well, what I wonder, too, is did they throw out the ones because apparently most of the folders never even made it. Did they just toss those and say of the ones who got there, this is how they're connected? Yes, but I believe that most of the ones that didn't get there were because the initial farmers in Kansas and Nebraska just threw them out.

10:06They didn't participate. Really? I think that's what happened to the majority of them. So, yeah, it wasn't like the most robust study of all time, but it was so fascinating that it just captured the imagination of people and became kind of a pop cultural meme. But what's interesting about it is that later scholarship that was pretty robust studies supported what Milgram and his collaborator Jeffrey Travers found in that study. Yeah, there was one in 2003 that found a median of five to seven. This is pretty old data, but in 2011, they did the degrees of separation on other social media sites. And for Facebook at the time, it was 4.74.

10:47And for the at the time named Twitter, it was 4.67. But the caveat there is like, you're not necessarily counting just the people that you know, like I know plenty of people when I was on Facebook that had lots of like, what were they on Facebook friends? Yeah, friends who they they had no idea who they were. It was just more of a maybe a networking thing, kind of like LinkedIn. Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, six degrees, too. Yeah. Yeah, Laura, Dr. Claw, who helped us out with this, points out that social media kind of has a stretch, the definition of what we consider a connection, like you just said.

11:29And also, you said what used to be called Twitter. I think it's hilarious because very frequently you'll see Twitter used in like some sort of article or whatever. And then in parentheses after that, it'll say X. Yeah, and I mean, everyone still says Twitter, it seems like. Yeah. It just didn't take. Like, sorry, the name change for the business you bought did not take. Yeah, it's because X is dumb. I guess so. Twitter was just so perfect, I guess. Well, I mean, I don't know if Twitter is a good name or not, but it had such recognition. It's just like, yeah. It's like the people who bought the Sears Tower and tried to change the name, and everybody's like, nope, still Sears Tower, sorry.

12:10Yeah, I love that when a corporate sponsor takes over and they're like, no, we're still going to call it the thing it was before. It's still the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. Sorry. Sorry, cars.com. Well, you mentioned Kevin Bacon. And we should mention real quick, the six degrees of Kevin Bacon was a very popular thing created by some college students where and the idea is that Kevin Bacon has been in so many varied movies over the years that you can connect any actor in Hollywood to Kevin Bacon in less than six degrees or less. But the Bacon number apparently is 3.12 and there are 522 actors who have a smaller connectivity number or Bacon number than that.

12:52Yeah, they're more connected to people than Kevin Bacon. I didn't know that, Chuck. Did you? Well, there were 522 or there were more connected actors? Both. I mean, I figured there were more connected actors because there were people. Well, Eric Roberts is the number one with two point nine zero eight four one because he has eight hundred and sixty five IMDb entries as an actor. So I figured there were people that were in way more movies. And that's just math, you know. Sure, it is. But also you can make a case that Kevin Bacon's 111 movies typically are with more stars who have more work. So it's likelier that the people he worked with are in more movies with more other people.

13:38Whereas Eric Roberts is probably in movies with people like this is their one and only movie. Or people who are in like 600 movies that you just have never heard of. That's true, too. That's possible. If Riff Treks taught me anything, it's that. Yeah. Like, I know who Cameron Mitchell is, for Pete's sake. Who's that? He's one of those guys who's in a million movies that you've never heard of. But you recognize his face? Face, name. I think I actually know some of his family members now. Right. I'm going to have to look this guy up. Yeah. Oh, man. It will take you on an odyssey. And don't even bother watching the original version of the movies.

14:14Just watch the Riff Treks version of Cameron Mitchell's movies. A rare in-store or in-show lookup, Cameron Mitchell. Huh. Oh, no. He's a restaurateur. That's not him. Lookup Cameron Mitchell's Space Mutiny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that guy. Was he in Plan 9? Maybe. He really might have been. Well, and now I'm seeing a picture of him as an older gentleman, and I've seen him in movies as an older gentleman, too. Speaking of Space Mutiny, that's a really great riffrax to start with. Those guys are the best. And wait, actually, I think that's an MST3K to start. Watch both versions. How about that?

14:53All right. Well, that's what I meant. But yeah. Okay. So do you want to take a break, Chuck? Yeah, let's take a break and talk more about old Internet right after this.

15:29Okay, Chuck. So we said we were going to take a stroll down internet memory lane. And this was a time when, like, I think the year before Six Degrees launched, Craigslist launched, Amazon.com launched, and they were just selling books at the time. Yeah. One of the big search engines was Ask Jeeves. And it was revolutionary because you could use natural language rather than have to figure out exactly what keyword you needed to put in to get results. Yeah. Like with Lycos. Yeah, yeah, totally. Which, by the way, Ask Jeeves is ask.com now. Did you know that? I think I did know that. I knew it changed into something.

16:08Well, it changed. They just got rid of Jeeves, which is super sad. I know. It is pretty sad. They retired him. He went off to live on a farm, as they say. Yeah. Which means they kill them. How Six Degrees worked, though, is interesting because not only was it the name copped from Six Degrees of Separation, they actually organized the website in such a way. And it seemed like part of the fun of it. And again, this is early Internet. If you're a youngster out there, you may think this is super funny that people thought this was fun. But it seems like part of the fun of six degrees dot com was finding people you didn't know and then tracing that connection through the website.

16:49Right. So one of the things that you would do is go through the I guess the registry of other six degree users. And there were so few initially that you could do that rather than go through three and a half million people. It was just a few hundred potentially. And you'd be like, oh, I know them. I know them. and you would make a connection with them. They would confirm it. And now you were a first degree connection. You two were because you actually know each other, right? Yeah. And you, like you said, you had to confirm that connection, but you could also include people who weren't on it yet.

17:22Like, I'm just going to list out my family members or whatever and put their email addresses in. Keep in mind, this is at a time where you didn't get a lot of email. You didn't get much, if any, spam email. And sometimes getting an email was like, oh, wow, look at this. This is cool. So if you think about that now, like, oh, yeah, just put all your family and friends and put their emails in. That's like a fireable offense. Like socially go to jail. I think you can. But back then it was a different deal. So you can include people, put their emails and they would get an email asking for confirmation and saying, and also, do you want to sign up for this cool new thing?

18:00No. Yeah, exactly. So the people that knew the people you knew, but you weren't directly connected to them, you were now second degree connected with them. And then those people were connected to people that you didn't know. And they were third degree connections. I think it didn't go beyond third degree. Like they didn't go all the way up to six. I think that was totally unnecessary. But this was like, yeah, this is very groundbreaking and revolutionary. And people were just amazed by people they knew. And the point was, like, who do your friends know that you want to know that you don't know yet?

18:33Now you can make a first degree connection with those people if they confirm you. Yeah, I mean, that's the way it was sort of like a predecessor to LinkedIn. I mean, you'll see again, like you said, like seeds of all the social media websites. They were doing it because you could create a profile with your professional affiliations and stuff like that. you were encouraged. And I think most people probably really did use their real identities because at the time people were like, well, what kind of a weirdo would just create some fake identity on the internet just to mess with people? So there were real people on there that was a member of the trustee data privacy program, which has now been bundled up under trust arc.

19:17But email was very central to it all. It was not an app. They didn't have apps yet. You would get an email asking for confirmation. You would reply via email. You would add others via email. So it was just a different time. Yeah. And there were, I mean, you would add your hobbies. You would add who you worked for, what degrees you had maybe. So, yeah, again, lots of seeds of LinkedIn for sure. Again, no pictures. And this was a huge stumbling block, as we'll see. But they did have other functionality that was thrilling. It had basically in-network emailing, right? So you could directly contact your contacts had they confirmed you.

19:58There are bulletin boards where you could essentially chat. And I think they had a bunch of other kind of bells and whistles that they added over the years. They had something called channels, which were essentially special interest groups. And you could be like, oh, I'm interested in business and finance or I'm interested in games. I think meaning at the time, nothing but Oregon Trail. Right. And you could just go and find other people on these message boards that were interested in these things and maybe make some context if they confirmed you. Yeah. Again, way ahead of its time with Facebook groups.

20:34That's exactly what they did. We got some and you can go look these up if you want to see like screenshots of what the screen look like. I believe we were sent one from October 1999, a welcome scream. scream screen. And it was it was cute. It looked like a fun website of the day. It had a service marketplace. There was daily trivia on the homepage. There was this is hysterical. There was a daily poll. And on that day in October of 1999, this was the poll. When you get a chain letter from a friend, you a immediately throw it away. B do what it says ASAP. C hold on to it for a while and then lose it.

21:11So it's clearly they weren't like super future facing if they were like, Chain letters. That's relatable, right? Right. I found one also, Chuck, from February 29th, 2000. So that was a leap year. It was the question of the day was Bill and Monica. And then your choices were love, lust, and as long as it's not Hillary. That was the question of the day. That's pretty funny. By that time, six or eight months after the October one that was sent and probably in the February one that you saw, they were there were little nuggets of engagement boosting that they were trying to use. Like, hey, here's some content.

21:54Here's some like join this Mother's Day group or we're going to spotlight this channel. um they had it was they would tell how many people were online at that moment which uh in the october of 1999 it was uh 510 people which sounds very funny but i distinctly remember being in like chat rooms where they would say like like 300 people are in there and i would it would blow my mind that there were that many yeah it just seemed like oh my god dude i'm in my living room in new Jersey and I'm on this computer and there are 300 people around the world that I can talk to right now. That's neat. And what did you say?

22:32Well, I did have one specific interaction with someone, of course, at the time, I thought it was a real girl about our love of Cat Stevens. And we had a real back and forth going and a lot in common. And I'm sure that was probably a nine-year-old boy. You got catfished over Cat Stevens. I might have, who knows? But I remember thinking like, hey, man, this girl sounds super cool. And there are no pictures, so I bet, you know, she's cute as far as I know. Well, a nine-year-old boy who's into Cat Stevens is probably pretty cool, too. Yeah, that probably would have been a better online friend to chat about real music.

23:07Right. Another thing I saw on that February 2000 page was the theme of the week. And this theme was, to thine own self, improve. So there was, like, you could click on to Zen practice group. Yeah, self-help. feng shui, reiki. There was a book club. They were just throwing everything they could at this to just get people to interact more and more and more because the more engaged you were, the more likely you were to send out those emails to your friends and be like, hey, join me on here. It's pretty awesome. So maybe let's talk about pictures real quick and then we'll take a break because the lack of pictures is the big deal, especially when you look at the modern internet.

23:52a website with just text and maybe, you know, clip art and stuff like that isn't super engaging, obviously. So the reason why they didn't have pictures is because there was no way to get pictures there. You know, there weren't digital cameras. There was the Apple Quick Take 100 that was released a few years before. If you look at pictures of this, it's about the size of a sandwich, kind of funny looking um it was the first digital camera it costs 750 bucks uh the canon power shot was the first digital camera that could write images to a hard disk that was released uh kind of one yeah one year before um six degrees came online in 1996 that was almost a thousand dollars had 176 megs of storage but the first camera phone didn't come along until 99 and that was uh Kyocera Visual Phone VP210.

24:48Yeah, it was actually cheap considering it's$634 in today's dollars for a camera phone. It was a 0.11 megapixel camera. For comparison, the iPhone 16 has as much as 48 megapixels. Yeah. But if you look up some of the promotional images of this, There's like Japanese women holding the phone that's showing a picture of themselves. You can clearly see who it is. Yes, that's another word for it. I'm using 1997 terminology, though. Like you can see, you can tell it's them. I think one version of it is in color. It's not that bad, especially for$650. Because you can tell it's them. Yeah. You don't have to like squint your eyes to make the pixels come together.

25:39And you're like, is that Popeye? It's like you can tell it's them, I guess. Yeah. I was impressed by it. So it did its most basic function as an image capturing device. Yes. Being able to tell it was that thing. Right. Oh, one other thing I saw about the Apple Quick Take 100. At its highest resolution, it could store up to eight photos at once. Whoa. This is so much fun. And I love making fun of the early Internet. I know that we lived through. This is also a true story. Weinreich, the founder, would get emails where people would say, hey, can I snail mail you a physical photo? I have it. Can you can I send it to you via the U.S.

26:21Postal Service? And can you scan it and attach it to my profile? Because you really need pictures on this thing. Right. And they're like, maybe. And then somebody around the table at the bowl session said, well, wait, what if people want to start like updating or changing their photos? And Andrew Weinreich, I think it's Weinreich maybe, said, you know, let's just skip that. All right. Okay. No, no, I'm saying Weinreich said that, not us. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, there's like a rare in-show edit that didn't get edited on purpose. Should we take that break now? I feel like we need to, yes. All right, I'm going to go do 20 push-ups for that and I'll be right back.