Sixdegrees.com: A Social Media Origin Story

Summary

Stuff You Should Know: Sixdegrees.com – A Social Media Origin Story

Episode Release Date: July 10, 2025 | Hosts: Chuck Bryant & Josh Clark | Produced by iHeartPodcasts

---

Introduction to Sixdegrees.com

In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, hosts Chuck Bryant and Josh Clark embark on an enlightening journey back to the nascent days of social media, focusing on Sixdegrees.com—widely regarded as the first social media website. Launched in 1997 by Andrew Weinreich, Sixdegrees.com sought to connect people in ways that were revolutionary for its time.

Chuck Bryant [06:13]: "And it's kind of sad that 6 degrees has kind of gotten lost to history. Most people think Friendster was the first social media site. No, 6 degrees was."

---

The Genesis of Sixdegrees.com

Sixdegrees.com emerged during a period when the Internet was barely penetrating households. At its peak, the platform garnered approximately 3.5 million users, a significant number for the late '90s but modest compared to today's standards.

Chuck Bryant [01:39]: "What we're talking about here is the first, what's regarded as the first social media website... it was called sixdegrees.com spelled out s I x degrees dot com."

The platform was meticulously named after the "six degrees of separation" concept, which posits that any two people are connected by no more than six acquaintances. This idea was inspired by the seminal Milgram Experiment conducted in the late 1960s.

Josh Clark [07:32]: "So Six Degrees may sound familiar to people. It's actually very much related to the six degrees of Kevin Bacon or 6 degrees of separation..."

---

Challenges Faced by Sixdegrees.com

Despite its pioneering stance, Sixdegrees.com grappled with several formidable challenges:

1. Limited Internet Adoption:

   • In 1997, only about 18-36% of U.S. households had Internet access (Chuck Bryant [02:30]). This limited the potential user base drastically compared to later social platforms.

2. Technological Constraints:

   • Dial-up modems capped at 56 kilobytes per second, making activities like downloading images painfully slow.
   • The absence of digital cameras and limited digital image capabilities meant profiles lacked photographs, a significant drawback for a social networking site.

3. Economic Downturn:

   • The dot-com bubble burst in 2000 adversely affected funding and investor confidence, leading to the platform's eventual shutdown.

Josh Clark [04:29]: "And there were transfer speeds using dial up modems of 56 kilobytes per second... That was the transfer speed at the time and that was the maximum."

---

Features and User Experience

Sixdegrees.com was ahead of its time, incorporating several features that would become staples in future social media platforms:

• Profiles: Users could create detailed profiles including hobbies, professional affiliations, and personal information.
• Connections: Emphasizing the "degrees" concept, users could connect with friends, friends of friends, and so on, fostering a networked community.
• Messaging and Bulletin Boards: The platform offered in-network emailing and message boards categorized into various interests or "channels," reminiscent of modern Facebook Groups.
• Interactive Elements: Features like daily polls and trivia were integrated to boost user engagement.

Chuck Bryant [22:11]: "And then somebody around the table at the bowl session said, but wait, what if people want to start like, updating or changing their photos? And Andrew Weinreich maybe said, you know, let's just skip that."

Despite these innovations, the lack of multimedia integration, particularly images, limited the platform's appeal and user connection.

---

The Decline and Closure

Sixdegrees.com's downfall was swift and emblematic of the broader challenges during the dot-com era:

• Financial Instability:

  • Youth Stream Media Networks acquired Sixdegrees.com in 1999, selling it for $125 million in stock options. However, the company's heavy debt financing made it vulnerable when the dot-com bubble burst, leading to financial collapse shortly after.

• Technological Obsolescence:

  • The slow internet infrastructure and lack of critical features like image uploads made Sixdegrees.com less competitive as more advanced social platforms emerged.

• Monetization Struggles:

  • Early attempts at monetization through advertisements and sponsored content were insufficient to sustain the platform's operations.

Chuck Bryant [40:11]: "He sold in 1999 for 125 million in stock options in Youth Stream media networks. But this... shut down in 99."

---

Legacy and Impact on Future Social Media

Despite its short lifespan, Sixdegrees.com laid the foundational principles of social networking that subsequent platforms would refine and expand upon:

• Connectivity Models: The emphasis on interconnected networks and degrees of separation influenced platforms like Friendster, MySpace, and ultimately Facebook.

• User Engagement Strategies: Interactive features such as polls, trivia, and interest-based groups became standard in later social media sites.

• Privacy and Identity Verification: Early practices of using verified email confirmations and encouraging real identities prefigured modern concerns around privacy and authenticity online.

Josh Clark [41:31]: "But what's interesting about it is that later scholarship... supported what Milgram and his collaborator Jeffrey Travers found in that study."

Additionally, the sold Sixdegrees.com patent influenced the development of LinkedIn's networking algorithms, demonstrating the enduring intellectual legacy of Weinreich's work.

---

Andrew Weinreich: The Visionary Entrepreneur

Andrew Weinreich, the brain behind Sixdegrees.com, continued to demonstrate his entrepreneurial spirit post the platform's closure:

• mi Moi:

  • A location-based dating app that connected people physically near each other, sold to the parent company of Match.com.

• Indicative:

  • A data analytics company leveraging location tracking data, which was ahead of its time in utilizing mobile data for analytics purposes.

• Recent Endeavors:

  • Weinreich launched a podcast titled "Predicting Our Future," exploring forthcoming societal and technological changes.

Chuck Bryant [45:50]: "But that's why you're the heart of the show."

---

Notable Quotes

• Chuck Bryant:
  "It was like, who do your friends know that you want to know that you don't know yet?" [22:49]

• Josh Clark:
  "Six Degrees may sound familiar to people... it just was so far ahead of its time that it got lost to history." [06:43]

• Chuck Bryant:
  "MySpace ultimately got about 10 million, but they had a lot of technical problems, so they didn't last." [07:03]

• Josh Clark:
  "If you want to be like Matt and send us a world class email, we would love that." [47:58]

---

Listener Insights

The episode also features a heartfelt listener email from Matt, a 40-something man with autism, discussing the challenges of impression management and societal perceptions. The hosts highlight the importance of empathy and understanding diverse experiences, reinforcing the show's commitment to addressing a wide array of human knowledge and experiences.

Matt's Email:
"I cannot match the body language of others and have to fake it... Discrimination is very real... Hopefully people who listen will give people with a bit of a quirk some slack." [46:24]

---

Conclusion

Sixdegrees.com: A Social Media Origin Story offers a comprehensive look into the early days of social networking, highlighting both the visionary aspects and the inherent challenges of pioneering technological platforms. Chuck and Josh effectively illustrate how Sixdegrees.com set the stage for the social media explosion that would follow, underscoring the delicate balance between innovation and technological readiness.

---

Remember: To explore more intriguing tales from the digital frontier and beyond, subscribe to Stuff You Should Know on your favorite podcast platform!

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Josh Clark]

Pedigree believes dogs bring out the good in people. Pedigree brings out the good in them with high quality nutrition at an affordable price. They offer a variety of tasty dry food, wet food and treats that your dog will love. They're made with high quality ingredients and they have great taste in every bowl. Plus they support total health. Visit your local retailer to try Pedigree products for the nutrition your dog needs and a taste your dog will love local. Learn [e-mail] Feed Good Feed the good.

[Unknown]

Every day has a to do list, but adding Enjoy Belvita to yours can help you knock out the rest of it. Belvita Breakfast Biscuits are a tasty and convenient breakfast option when paired with low fat yogurt and fruit that provide steady energy all morning while Belvita Energy Snack bites give you the perfect mid morning refuel. Best part, they both taste great, so make the most out of your morning with a bite of Belvita. Pick up a pack of Belvita at your local store today.

[Chuck Bryant]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, here's Jerry, and we're gonna take a nice little stroll down Internet memory lane here on Stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, this is something I had never heard of. Had you heard of this?

[Josh Clark]

No. I ran it past Yumi and she's like, oh man, you. Yes, I think I've heard of it and I don't know if she has or not.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, Yumi is an early adopter.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, she was definitely more Internet Y than I was at that time.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. It was called sixdegrees.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.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure.

[Josh Clark]

But yes, the deck was stacked against them in the fact that they were essentially very much ahead of Their time, they 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% of households. According to the U.S. census, in 1997, when Six Degrees launched, only 18% had Internet at home at the time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. There's a competing stat from Pew Research center that said 36% did, but there was different methodologies and stuff. So let's just say, you know, somewhere in between those numbers, I bet it was more, more like 18. This was, you know, 97 was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years before Friendster launched. Friendster, that's hard to say for some reason, 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. 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.

[Josh Clark]

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. It's either yes, I use it or I don't use it. It's a nice solid survey.

[Chuck Bryant]

Agreed.

[Josh Clark]

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. Really, really big. One was the slow speed of Internet.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

There were transfer speeds using dial up modems of 56 kilobytes per second. That 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. Yeah. Just Sit there for five minutes or whatever.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, you had time to go make and eat toast while a picture was downloading.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I ate a lot of toast.

[Josh Clark]

Back then, so that was a big challenge for it, too. And 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. 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.

[Josh Clark]

No. And it's kind of sad that 6 degrees has kind of gotten lost to history. Most people think Friendster was the first social media site. No, 6 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. Friendster ultimately got about 10 million, but they had a lot of technical problems, so they didn't last. MySpace 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.

[Josh Clark]

I believe that.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, it kind of puts their three and a half million users into perspective.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So Six Degrees may sound familiar to people. It's actually very much related to the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon or 6 degrees of separation, the play by John Guayer, 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?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. 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?

[Josh Clark]

No, it was the late 60s.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. And 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. So that would be 1, 2, 3, 4 degrees of separation, which is pretty remarkable, I think.

[Josh Clark]

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. Because that's where he started, Right. 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. Mean 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, 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?

[Josh Clark]

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. They didn't participate.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really?

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, and 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 in Facebook? Friends. Yeah, friends who. They had no idea who they were. It was just more of a. Maybe a networking thing, kind of like LinkedIn.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. And as we'll see, six degrees too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

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. And 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, everyone still says Twitter. It seems like.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it just didn't take. Like, Sorry, the name change for the business you bought did not take.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's because X is dumb, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

So Twitter was just so perfect, I guess.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, I mean, I don't know if Twitter's a good name or not, but it had such recognition. It's just like.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, 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.

[Josh Clark]

It's still the Tostitos Fiesta bowl. Sorry, sorry. Cars.com.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they're more connected to people than Kevin Bacon. I didn't know that, Chuck. Did you?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, well, that there were 522 or that there were more connected actors?

[Josh Clark]

Both.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, I figured there were more connected actors because there were people. Well, Eric Roberts is the number one with 2.90841 because he has 865 IMDb entries as an actor. So I figured there were people that were in way more movies. And that's just Matt, you know.

[Josh Clark]

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 work with are in more movies with more other people. Whereas Eric Roberts is probably in movies with people like this is their one and only movie.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or people who are in like 600 movies that you just have never heard of.

[Josh Clark]

That's true too. That's possible. If Riftrax taught me anything, it's that I know who Cameron Mitchell is. For Pete's.

[Chuck Bryant]

Who's that?

[Josh Clark]

He's one of those guys who's in a million movies that you've never heard.

[Chuck Bryant]

Of, but you recognize his face.

[Josh Clark]

Face name. Yeah, I think I actually know some of his family members now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. I'm going to have to look this guy up.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Oh man. It will take you on an odyssey. And don't even bother watching the original version of the movies. Just watch the Rift Track version of Cameron Mitchell's movies.

[Chuck Bryant]

A rare in store or in show lookup. Cameron Mitchell, huh? Oh, no, he's a restaurateur.

[Josh Clark]

That's not him. Look up Cameron Mitchell's Space Mutiny.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that guy. Was he in Plan nine?

[Josh Clark]

Maybe. He really might have been.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Speaking of Space Mutiny, that's a really great Rift tracks to start with.

[Chuck Bryant]

Those guys are the best.

[Josh Clark]

And wait, actually, I think that's a MST3K to start. Watch both versions. How about that?

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, well, that's what I meant. But yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. So do you want to take a break, Chuck?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, let's take a break and talk more about old Internet right after this.

[Unknown]

Hot days, humid nights and non stop plans. All that heat can increase hair shedding while a packed schedule can add stress which can impact your hair. Nutrafol's whole body approach and clinically tested formulas support your hair from within so you can focus on living your best life all summer long.

Neutral is the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement brand trusted by over one and a half million people See thicker, stronger, faster growing hair with less shedding in just three to six months.

With Neutrfol Thinning hair is different for men and women, so a one size fits all approach to hair growth doesn't cut it. Neutropol has multiple formulas for men and women that are tailored to different life stages such as postpartum or menopause and lifestyle factors such as a plant based lifestyle. You can get just what you need. Plus Users of Nutrafol men reported no impact to sexual performance.

Thank goodness. While many supplements rely solely on ingredient studies, Nutrafol clinically tests final formulations to ensure their efficacy. In a clinical study, 84% of men showed improvement in their hair after six months taking Nutrafol Men Hair Growth Supplement and 90% of women saw overall improvement in their hair after taking Nutrafol Women Hair Growth supplement for six months.

Building a hair growth routine is easy. Order online, no prescription needed. Enjoy free shipping, automated deliveries and up to 20% savings. Savings with Nutrafol subscription plus get free naturopathic doctor consults and a Headspace Meditation membership.

Start your hair growth journey with Nutrafol For a limited time. Neutrophil is offering listeners $10 off your first month subscription. Free shipping. When you go to neutrophil.com enter promo.

Code cultureistas find out why Neutropol is the best selling hair growth supplement [e-mail] spelled n u t r-a f o l.com promo code culturistas that's nutrafol.com promo code culturistas.

[Ira Glass]

But let's be real. Life happens. Kids spill, pets shed and accidents are inevitable. Find a sofa that can keep [e-mail] starting at just $699. Our sofas are fully machine washable inside and out so you can say goodbye to stains and hello to worry free living. Made with liquid and stain resistant fabrics, they're kid proof, pet friendly and built for everyday life. Plus, changeable fabric covers let you refresh your sofa whenever you want. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment. Plus, they're earth friendly and trusted by over 200,000 happy customers. It's time to upgrade to a stress free mess proof sofa. Visit washablesofas.com today and save that's washablesofas.com offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

[Unknown]

This is Ira Glass, the host of this American Life. So much is changing so rapidly right now with President Trump in office. It feels good to pause for a moment sometimes and look around at what's what to try and do that. We've been finding these incredible stories about right now that are funny and have feeling and you get to see people everywhere adapting and making sense of this new America that we find ourselves in. If you haven't listened in a while, I honestly think these are some of the best stories we've ever done. This is American Life every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, 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. With Lycos.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah, totally.

[Josh Clark]

Which, by the way, Ask Jeeves is ask.com now. Did you know that?

[Chuck Bryant]

I think I did know that. I knew it changed into something.

[Josh Clark]

Well, it changed into something.

[Chuck Bryant]

They just got rid of Jeeves, which is super sad.

[Josh Clark]

I know, it is pretty sad. They retired him. He went off to live on a farm, as they say, which means they killed him.

[Chuck Bryant]

How 6 degrees work, 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 sixdegrees. Com was Finding people you didn't know and then tracing that connection through the website.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So one of the things that you would do is go through the, I guess the registry of other 6 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 youtuber because you actually know each other, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And like you said, you had to confirm that connection, but you could also include people who weren't on it yet. Like, I'm just gonna 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. Squeaky. 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, a fireable offense. Like socially, I think you can 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?

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly.

[Josh Clark]

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? Now you can make a first degree connection with those people if they confirm you.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 Ark. But 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.

[Josh Clark]

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. There 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, again, way ahead of its time with Facebook groups. That'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 looked like. I believe we were sent one from October 1999. A welcome scream. Scream screen. And 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 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 onto it for a while and then lose it. So it's clearly they weren't like super future facing. If they were like chain letters, that's relatable.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Right. I found one also, Chuck, from February 29, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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, there were little nuggets of engagement boosting. That they were trying to use. Like, hey, here's some content, here's some like, join this Mother's Day group or we're gonna spotlight this channel. They would tell how many people were online at that moment, which in the October 1999, it was 510 people. Which sounds very funny, but I distinctly remember being in like chat rooms where they would say like 300 people are in there and it would blow my.

[Josh Clark]

Mind that there were that many.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

That's neat. And what did you say?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, 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 9 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.

[Josh Clark]

Well, a nine year old boy who's into Cat Stevens is probably pretty cool too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. That probably would have been a better online friend to chat about real music.

[Josh Clark]

Right. 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, self help, Feng shui, Reiki. There was a book club. They were just throwing everything they could.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

At this. To just get people to interact more and more and more because it would. You. The. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

So maybe let's talk about pictures real quick and then we'll take a break. Because the lack of pictures is a big deal. Especially when you look at the modern Internet. A 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. The. There was the Apple QuickTake 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. It was the first digital camera. It cost 750 bucks. The Canon PowerShot was the first digital camera that could write images to a hard disk. That was released kind of one year before Six Degrees came online in 1996. That was almost $1,000. Had 176 megs of storage. But the first camera phone didn't come along until 99. And that was Kyocera Visual Phone VP210.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it was actually cheap, considering it's 634 bucks 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 like the. The promotional images of this, there's like, 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. They, like, you can see, you can tell it's them. I think one version of it is in colored. It's not that bad, especially for.

[Chuck Bryant]

Because you can tell it's them.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you don't have to squint your eyes to make the pixels come together. And you're like, is that Popeye? You can tell it's them. I guess I was impressed by it.

[Chuck Bryant]

So it did its most basic function as an image capturing device.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Being able to tell it was that thing.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Oh, one other thing I saw about the Apple QuickTake 100. At its highest resolution, it could store up to eight photos at once.

[Chuck Bryant]

Whoa.

[Josh Clark]

This is so much fun. I love making fun of the early Internet.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know that we live 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 I send it to you via the US Postal Service? And can you scan it and attach it to my profile? Because you really need pictures on this thing.

[Josh Clark]

Right? And they were like, maybe. And then somebody around the table at the bowl session said, but wait, what if people want to start like, updating or changing their photos? And Andrew Wein, 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah, yeah, I know.

[Josh Clark]

Well, there's like a rare in show edit that didn't get edited on purpose.

[Chuck Bryant]

Should we take that break now?

[Josh Clark]

I feel like we need to. Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, I'm going to go do 20 pushups. For that and I'll be right back.

[Ira Glass]

Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? WashablesOfAs.com has your back. Featuring the Annabe collection, the only designer sofa that's machine washable inside and out. Where designer quality meets budget friendly prices. That's right, sofas start at just $699. Enjoy a no risk experience with pet friendly stain resistant and changeable slipcovers made with performance fabrics. Experience cloud like comfort with high resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing. The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime. Check out washablesofas.com and get up to 60% off your annabe sofa backed by a 30 day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund. No return, shipping or restocking fees. Every penny back. Upgrade [e-mail] Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

[Unknown]

This is Ira Glass, the host of this American Life. So much is changing so rapidly right now with President Trump in office. It feels good to pause for a moment sometimes and look around at what's what to try and do that. We've been finding these incredible stories about right now that are funny and have feeling and you get to see people everywhere adapting and making sense of this new America that we find ourselves in. If you haven't listened in a while, I honestly think these are some of the best stories we've ever done. This is American Life every week, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so Weinreich. It's Wine Reich.

[Josh Clark]

Wine Rich. I think Weinrich. Okay. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how I think it was Wikipedia that had the pronunciation and I think it said Weinrich.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, all right, maybe he was trying to seem less German.

[Josh Clark]

Right? Yeah. That always reminds me of that part in 30 Rock where Tina Fey is like, well, she's apologizing and she said, I'm very sorry, like Mr. Wiener Slav. And he said, it's Wiener Slave. That's such a good joke. Have you ever seen Unbreakable? Kimmy Schmidt? Have you seen that yet?

[Chuck Bryant]

I watched it. I mean, when it came out years ago, I watched the first season or so.

[Josh Clark]

There aren't that many shows that can make me actually laugh out loud, and that's one of them. And it's because Tim Faye is one of the best comedy writers to ever live.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, agreed. Have you seen the Four Seasons yet?

[Josh Clark]

No, I'm avoiding it. I saw that it's a remake of an Alan Alda film. And I have a strict policy not to watch late 70s, early 80s Alan Alda films or their remakes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, God. Your distaste for Alan Alda is truly disturbing.

[Josh Clark]

The thing is, I've got nothing against Alan Alda, personally. It's those kind of movies. Same with Elliot Gould. I can't stand those kind of movies. Like, where it's just like. Like, hey, I can't even do an impression of it. But I can't stand those kind of movies. And somebody out there knows what I'm talking about.

[Chuck Bryant]

Elliott Gould kind of movies.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. Whether it's Capricorn one or that Shaggy dog movie that he's in where he.

[Chuck Bryant]

Plays the detective, I will say that one movie I think you would like is the Long Goodbye.

[Josh Clark]

That's the one I'm talking about. That's the Shaggy dog detective one. I don't think I would.

[Chuck Bryant]

What does Shaggy Dog Detective mean? I don't understand what that means.

[Josh Clark]

So Shaggy Dog is where, like, there's this whole build up of, like, say, a mystery or something, and it turns out to be nothing. Like, there's really no point to the movie at. In the end.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay. So I thought you would like the Long Goodbye. Great Robert Altman noir.

[Josh Clark]

And I like Robert Altman stuff, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Raymond Chandler book.

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

Still nothing, huh?

[Josh Clark]

I wouldn't if you made it. No, I can't make. If you made it before Elliott Gould was in it, I would probably watch it.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, fair enough.

[Josh Clark]

Wait, one more thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Speaking of great directors, I finally saw Ghost Dog, Way of the Samurai by Darmish. Did you see that ever?

[Chuck Bryant]

I saw that in the theater, buddy.

[Josh Clark]

I was guessing that you had. That is such a good movie. Man. I can't believe that slipped under my radar because that totally was in my wheelhouse for that. That time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Yeah. Jarmusch is the best. And Forest Whitaker was so good in that.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, he was.

[Chuck Bryant]

Good music, too.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. How did that start? Weinreich? Trying to seem less German? This is the six degrees of that conversation, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

Mr. Wiener Slave.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Wiener Slave. So here's what Weinrich.

[Josh Clark]

There's one other thing that reminds me of, too. Do you remember we were talking about the vanity license plate episode?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And the greatest misconstrued vanity plate of all time is where the guy had, J is Lord. Like, Jesus is Lord, but it's all one word. So it says jizz Lord, Jiz. Lord, that's the greatest vanity play anyone's ever had.

[Chuck Bryant]

That definitely beats ass, man.

[Josh Clark]

Even I think so too. Which is a good one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's really funny, Jizz Lord.

[Josh Clark]

Especially taking it in the context it was originally. Yeah, exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Like who that guy was to be that, you know, dedicated of a Christian to do that on your license plate. And that's what you end up with.

[Josh Clark]

Rolling up to church with Jizzlord on your car.

[Chuck Bryant]

Man. You can make a movie about that.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you could. With starring Elliott Gould as the Jizzlord.

[Chuck Bryant]

So Weinrich said, and this is a quote that just kind of shows how far ahead of his time he was, his vision. It is abundantly clear to me that the world will index all of their relations, everyone's relationship in a single database. And that was like before anyone else was doing it. So they started off this thing as a. Just with a launch, like a physical launch event, a party in New York city. They had 200 invited guests and those were the first 200 members. And they were like, now you all go out and make this a thing by inviting your friends. So I'm curious, like who those 200 people were. That's a pretty interesting way to start a site like this.

[Josh Clark]

I think there were a lot of tech savvy people who were kind of like probably primed to take part in this to begin with. And I think at first they were adding like 50 new users a day.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

Which again, that's really small. And I think even for the time this was pretty small. But they're doing this through like email and stuff. You know, like it's, it's really, it's a weird transfer from online world to real world. It straddled both because it had to. Another good example of that is that they would use reps to go to campus to sign people up. Just like that same credit card model that credit card companies use to screw college kids, parents out of $1,000.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I remember I had the Amex college card and the only reason I got it, I didn't even really want or need a credit card. But you got three delta flight vouchers when you signed up for that card. So I got three plane flights.

[Josh Clark]

So where'd you go?

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't remember. Well, I do remember. Cause I know I went to LA for the first time to visit my brother when he lived there.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

When I was in college, did you.

[Josh Clark]

Go visit the six or nine year old Cat Stevens fan?

[Chuck Bryant]

I did. And it was a 75 year old woman wow, man.

[Josh Clark]

This story goes all over the place.

[Chuck Bryant]

It took quite a weird turn, but we're still good friends. She's still with us. She's 102.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, really?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That's cool, man. Does she listen to the podcast or is she like.

[Chuck Bryant]

Nah, only Cat Stevens all the time.

[Josh Clark]

That would get kind of old, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

So let's talk about the end of this thing, because as we all know, it's not still around. Although Dr. Claw said if you went there, had a homepage. I went there and I got a error.

[Josh Clark]

Gateway timeout. The old 504. Same here.

[Chuck Bryant]

The old 504.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I. But it's there. It's. If it weren't a domain that was active, it would come back as like, hey, you want to buy this domain? But it doesn't do that. It just is so slow that you can't connect to it. But it does domain to be there. Six degrees dot com. Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, considering the public knowledge of just that term, it's like you try going out these days and getting a better domain name.

[Josh Clark]

You know, you can't do it.

[Chuck Bryant]

You just can't. Don't feel too bad for Weinrich or Reich or Rick because He sold in 1999 for 125 million in stock options in Youth Stream media networks. But this, you know, if you know anything about Internet history, you know that this thing shut down in 99. And what that meant, that dot com bubble right there on The Horizon in 2000 shut down more websites than you could shake a stick at.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And actually, you can feel pretty bad for Weinrich because he took that $125 million in stock in a company that folded, like, months later because it was debt financed. So I don't know how much he actually walked away with, especially if there was possibly a blackout in him selling those stock options.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, so yeah, what you're saying is Youth Stream itself also went under.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they were just borrowing, borrowing, borrowing. And that's how they existed. And then when the. When the dot com bubble burst, they were worth nothing. And so that stock was worth nothing. I looked, I couldn't find how much he actually did make from that sale. Like, in real time.

[Chuck Bryant]

You can never find that out.

[Josh Clark]

No. And that usually means that it's not a very good amount. Yeah, they like to leak that stuff when it's like, eye popping, but when it's not, they're like, oh, I don't remember.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, good point. The other problem was it was very early in the Internet and that monetization was a real struggle. They had some ads, of course, I believe their question of the day had an actual sponsor, but it was just a little bit too early. Like right after they fell off, Friendster came along that also failed again. But then MySpace and Facebook, just on the heels of this, he did make some other dough off of it. I think the patent that he had with Six Degrees for the software for the platform, he sold for 700,000 real dollars to the CEO of LinkedIn and the CEO Mark Pincus, of a website called Tribe. And they were both Friendster investors.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, And Reid Hoffman, and he said that he and Mark Pincus were like, essentially fans. Like, they were like, weinrich is a God here. He, he. This patent not only is for the software, it's for the methodology of creating an online social network. No one had ever come up with something like that before. So they actually kind of bought it for a song. I looked and LinkedIn is apparently definitively not built on 6 degrees architecture or. And it never was, but it almost seems like they were either taking it to learn from it or almost like they were buying, like, some memorabilia that they were like fans of. I almost got that impression from an interview with Reid Hoffman.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, very interesting. Andrew Weinreich went on to do a lot of more things like this. He's kind of a serial entrepreneur. And again, it seems like he was always right there before the real thing came along because he had something called mi moi, as in m O I French for me. Right? Yeah, yeah, I thought so. I was just making sure. But that was a location based dating app and it was basically this idea that, like, hey, dating app or dating websites are really tough even at the time of the early Internet. And like, let's at least connect people who are physically close and it might be easier to get real dates. The dating part of that business was bought by the parent company of Match.com, once again, just right there next to the thing. And he and his memoir co founder bought out the business analytics part of their own company and used it to found a data analytics company called Indicative.

[Josh Clark]

Which is still around from what I can tell.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so maybe he's done all right there.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And so this was. I mean, this was very early 2000s too, and they were using location tracking data at the time, and that was huge and new. And so they kept that. I think they ended up either selling it or licensing it to a company called xtify. Not a very good name I should call it Twitterify.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, and they had some like, high profile clients. They had Ritz Carlton, they had Staples, they had Sephora. Publishers Clearinghouse.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, so they were. But they were using those location apps to advertise to you and send you push notifications on your phone, which sadly means that Andrew Weinrich is going to be going to hell for that.

[Chuck Bryant]

I mean, did he create that idea? I wonder.

[Josh Clark]

He gave or he sold Xtify the ability to do that and then IBM bought them, Right? Yeah. So I'm not sure how much he made from these buyouts. I hope a lot because again, this guy is coming up with ideas and making stuff happen long before they can become viable. And a lot of people probably have gotten very rich off the back of his ideas too. So I hope he's doing well.

[Chuck Bryant]

Maybe if he's listening or if someone knows him through their degrees of connectivity, just get to him and have him email [e-mail] and just send us your bank statement. That's right, so we'll know.

[Josh Clark]

I want to specify, by doing well, I don't mean just financially. I mean, I hope his well being, his sense of well being nice and inflated and happy and you know, that he's living a good life.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I agree. I cheapened it by making it financial. And that's why you're the heart of the show.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's me. I'm the one you're not supposed to touch, remember?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, well, you know what I mean.

[Josh Clark]

Oh. One thing that I did see that he's doing now is a podcast called Predicting Our Future. It's about what life is going to be like in the fairly near future. Pretty cool.

[Chuck Bryant]

Fantastic.

[Josh Clark]

So, Chuck, I think there's. That's it for six degrees calm. We got 40 minutes out of it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, not bad. Lots of fun stories in between.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, and what'd you just say? In between. Right. Well, then that means it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

Boy, I'm glad I always know the trigger word.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it's amazing. You never fail each episode.

[Chuck Bryant]

Go me. Hey guys. I'm a 40 something man with autism who lives on his own. And the need for impression management hit close home. So this was. I remember about. We even speculated about impression management that we might hear from some people with autism.

[Josh Clark]

This was a great email.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's a great. This is Josh curated even. I simply cannot match the body language of others and have to fake it. I don't instinctively smile or look angry. People say I have an almost disturbing calm demeanor. Being calm sounds great, but it has gotten me searched for additional screening at 20 airports and even strip searched at 1. When people grill you for questioning, a straight answer without fear frustrates the hell out of people whose job it is to make you feel uncomfortable. To help mask my autism, I wear sunglasses to hide my eyes and because of that I've gotten the nickname Terminator, a flat affect. Direct language doesn't help either. Discrimination is very real, guys. But I like to say getting angry at a person with autism who doesn't adhere to societal norms is like getting angry at a person with one leg that doesn't run marathons. Hopefully people who listen will give people with a bit of a quirk some slack. Thanks from a longtime listener that is Matt.

[Josh Clark]

I'm glad Matt wrote that one and that was a good, good email and I think he probably speaks for a lot of people in that situation.

[Chuck Bryant]

Totally a good reminder to everybody and something that like we talked about on that episode, as we've gotten older, we try to sort of think about not just that, but what everyone's going through in their life and maybe they're not having their best day when you meet them, you know?

[Josh Clark]

Yep, too true, Chuck. Too true. If you want to be like Matt and send us a world class email, we would love that. You can send it off to stuff [e-mail].

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartradio. For more podcasts from iHeartradio, visit the iHeartradio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you.

[Ira Glass]

Listen to your favorite shows.

[Josh Clark]

Pedigree believes dogs bring out the good in people. Pedigree brings out the good in them with high quality nutrition at an affordable price. They offer a variety of tasty dry food, wet food and treats that your dog will love. They're made with high quality ingredients and they have great taste in every bowl. Plus they support total health. Visit your local retailer to try Pedigree products for the nutrition your dog needs and a taste your dog will love. Learn [e-mail] Feed Good Feed the Good.

[Chuck Bryant]

This is an iHeart podcast.