Reminiscing On Six Degrees With Long Island Advertising Agencies

By Robert Sutter


Technology is interesting in the sense that every story has a beginning. Social media is no different, especially when discussing the various platforms that have launched and achieved popularity over the years. What you may not know about - and Long Island advertising agencies can tell you all about it - is what's known as the inaugural social media network. Six Degrees is the name and here are a few things that you should know about it.

Six Degrees is not a name that everyone knows, but what should be known is that it's essentially the first-ever social media site. It launched during 1997 - a time when the Internet was just starting to come into its own - and even predated the likes of MySpace. What made Six Degrees stand out was its ability for users to create their own lists, which would include family members, friends, co-workers, and the like. Back then, this feature mattered. Your local fishbat Long Island advertising agency will tell you, though, that social media has grown since then.

Companies such as fishbat will tell you that Six Degrees enjoyed a modest amount of success. As a matter of fact, it obtained a few million users, which meant tremendous usage of the feature mentioned earlier. The grown wasn't quite as expansive, though, since not everyone had immediate access to the Internet during that time. Six Degrees also generated more and more spam accounts later on in its life, which didn't exactly help the site in the long run.

Six Degrees was soon sold to YouthStream Media Networks, in 1999, for a total of $125 million. The site itself would ultimately close down in 2001, which ended the first-ever social media site's short run. Maybe Six Degrees would have lasted longer, or perhaps continued to thrive today, if the Internet was more robust back then. The site's features were interesting at the start, but failed to yield consistent engagement. It made sense why Six Degrees would shut its doors.

Even though this is more or less a general overview of Six Degrees, you can clearly see why it matters in the grand scheme of social media. Without it, chances are that we wouldn't have the websites we enjoy now. One can make the argument that Six Degrees is archaic by today's standards, which makes sense given the time it launched. Regardless, this site stands as an interesting piece of history that social media buffs might be interested to learn about.




About the Author: