Six Degrees

I decided to choose the social network site “Six Degrees” because it was the first recognized site of this type. It began in 1997 as a means for users to connect with each other and send messages. The initial concept was for each user to convince ten friends to join the site. These ten friends would be your “first degree”. The bulletin board of the site would only list messages from your first degree. The entire site was the “sixth degree”. The general concept was to create a site that would eventually link all the people in the world.

I have been aware of and intrigued by the concept of “six degrees of separation” since I first read the John Guare play. It was later made into a movie with Stockard Channing and Will Smith. The concept was first proposed in a short story in 1929 by Frigyes Karinthy. A character in the story believed that any person could be found to have a connection to any other person through five to other people. In 1967 a scientist at MIT tested this theory. He asked random people in the Mid-West to send a package through their network of friends, who they knew on a first name basis. to a person they did not know in the Massachusets area. All the senders knew was the package receiver’s name, occupation and general location. The results were that it took five to seven people to get the package delivered. In 2001, a Columbia University Professor, Duncan Watts, tried the experiment on the internet. His results showed that an e-mail message to a person that he was not acquainted with took six senders to reach the desired receiver. This was the “six degrees of separation”.

The Six Degrees web site lasted until 2000. It was speculated that its demise resulted from the smaller number of users on the web at that time. There has been speculation that the site was ahead of its time and might have thrived had their been a larger number of internet users.

Its users were not interested in meeting strangers, but instead using and communicating with their existing contacts. The site was set up so that an e-mail confirmation was needed to add members to your list of contacts. The site supported itself with ads and asked members to sample one of several services advertised on the site. The site also offered some premium savings to users of the site shopping online with some vendors.

I would have been interested in using this site because of my fascination with the inter-linking of people. I have had many experiences with “knowing someone who knew someone”, etc. I found this type of networking very helpful in finding jobs in many cities in the creative fields I was pursuing. After all there is the old Hollywood adage: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.