Sixdegrees.com: A Social Media Origin Story

# Stuff You Should Know Episode Summary

In this episode, Josh and Chuck explore Six Degrees, the forgotten social media pioneer that launched in 1997—years before Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. Founded by Andrew Weinreich, Six Degrees let users create profiles, connect with people they knew, and trace relationships through multiple degrees of separation, all inspired by Stanley Milgram's famous research on how closely people are connected. The hosts dive into why this revolutionary platform failed despite its innovation, including brutal timing (the dot-com bubble burst right after), extremely slow internet speeds, and the lack of digital cameras to include photos on profiles. They also explore Weinreich's prescient vision for indexing all human relationships in a database and follow his entrepreneurial journey through other ventures like location-based dating and data analytics.