Sixdegrees.com: A Social Media Origin Story

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

Hey, 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 up 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 internet-y than I was at that time.

Yeah, um, so we're what we're talking about here is uh, the first, what's regarded as the first social media website, uh, the thing that started the degradation of all mankind

way back in 1997.

It was called sixdegrees.com,

spelled out S-I-X degrees.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 were 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, it 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.

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 was 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.

Yeah,

there was 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 like 18.

This was, you know, 97 was one, two, three, four, five years before Prinster launched.

Prinster?

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, 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.

It'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.

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.

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.

Yeah, 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 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.

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.

No, 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.

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.

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.

Yeah.

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 Gwyer.

And then later the movie adaptation starring Stockard Channing, of course.

But it's actually, I didn't realize this 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.

Yeah, he got together with another 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.

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 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, 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.

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 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.

They didn't participate.

Oh, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, 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.

And Twitter was just so perfect, I guess.

Well, I mean, I don't know if Twitter's 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.

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.

It's still the Tostitos Fiesta.

Sorry.

Sorrycars.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 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.

Yeah,

they're more connected to people than Kevin Bacon.

I didn't know that, Chuck.

Did you?

Well,

that there were 522 or that 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 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 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 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.

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

That's true too.

That's possible.

If Riff Trek's taught me anything, it's that.

Like I know who Cameron Mitchell is, for Pete's sake.

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.

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

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.

Just watch the Riff Trek version of Cameron Mitchell's movies.

A rare in-store or in-show lookup.

Cameron Mitchell.

Huh.

Oh, no.

He's a a restaurateur.

That's not him.

Look up 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 riffracks 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?

All 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.

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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.

Yeah.

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.

Well, it changed into something.

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 killed him.

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 sixdegrees.com was finding people you didn't know and then tracing that connection through the website.

Right.

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.

Like, 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.

It's 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.

I can't even 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?

No.

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?

Now 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 Trust E data privacy program, which has now been bundled up under TrustArc.

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.

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 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 contacts if they confirmed you.

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 home page.

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 on to 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, 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,

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 going to spotlight this channel.

They would tell how many people were online at that moment, which in the October of 1999, it was 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

well i did have one specific interaction with uh 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 Kat 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 Kat Stevens is probably pretty cool, too.

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

Right.

Another thing I saw on that February 2000 page was the theme of the week.

And this theme was to 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 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 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.

There was the Apple QuickTake 100 that was released a few years before.

If you look up pictures of this, it's about the size of a a sandwich, kind of funny looking.

It was the first digital camera.

It cost $750.

The Canon PowerShot was the first digital camera that could write images to a hard disk.

That was released

kind of one, yeah, 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

Cayo Sera Visual Phone VP210.

Yeah, 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.

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.

You can tell it's them.

I think one version of it is in color.

It's not that bad,

especially for 16 years.

You can tell it's them.

Yeah.

You don't have to

squint your eyes to make the pixels come together.

And you're like, is that Popeye?

It's like you can tell it's them, I guess.

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 QuickTake 100, at its highest resolution, it could store up to eight photos at once.

Whoa.

This is so much fun.

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.

Postal Service?

And can you scan it and attach it to my profile?

Because you really need pictures on this thing.

Right.

And they were 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 Wine, I think it's Weinreich, maybe, said, Yeah, let's just skip that.

All right.

Okay.

No, no, I'm saying Weinreich said that, not us.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I know.

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.

Living with a rare autoimmune condition comes with challenges, but also incredible strength, especially for those living with conditions like myasthenia gravis or MG and chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, otherwise known as CIDP.

Finding empowerment in the community is critical.

That's right, and in the latest season of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby studio production in partnership with Arginix, host Martine Hackett explores what it means to reclaim your identity, discover resilience, and cultivate self-advocacy.

From the frustration of misdiagnosis to the small victories that fuel hope, every story told is meant to unite, uplift, and empower.

And that inspires us all to take one step closer to being a better advocate and seeing life from a different point of view.

So if you or a loved one are living with an autoimmune condition, find inspiration along your path.

Listen to Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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All right, so

Weinreich, it's Weinreich?

Weinrich, I think.

Weinrich?

Okay, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how

I think it was Wikipedia that had the pronunciation, and I think he said Weinrich.

Okay, all right.

Maybe he was trying to seem less German.

Right.

Yeah.

That always reminds me of

that part in 30 Rock where

Tina Fay 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?

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

There aren't that many shows that can make me actually laugh out loud, and that's one of them.

And it's because Tina Bay is one of the best comedy writers to ever live.

Yeah, agreed.

I don't, have you seen The Four Seasons yet?

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.

Oh, God.

Your distaste for Alan Alda is truly disturbing.

The thing is, I've got nothing against Alan Alda.

Personally, it's just those kind of movies.

Same with Elliot Gould.

I can't stand those kind of movies, like where it's just like,

yay,

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.

Elliot Gould kind of movies?

Yes.

Whether it's Capricorn One or that Shaggy Dog movie that he's in,

where he plays the detective?

I will say that one movie I think you would like is The Long Goodbye.

That's the one I'm talking about.

That's the Shaggy Dog Detective one.

I don't think I would.

What does Shaggy Dog Detective mean?

I don't know.

So, Shaggy Dog is where there's this whole build-up of, say, a mystery or something, and it turns out to be nothing.

Like, there's really no point to the movie in the end.

Oh, okay.

I thought you would like The Long Goodbye.

Great.

Robert Altman

noir.

No.

And I i like robert altman's stuff too raymond chandler book no still nothing huh i i wouldn't if if you made it no i can't make if you made it before elliot gould was in it i would probably watch it all right fair enough um wait one more thing yeah yeah speaking of um great directors i finally saw ghost dog way of the samurai by john darmish did you see that ever I saw that in the theater, buddy.

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 time.

Yeah, yeah.

Darmash is the best.

And Forrest Whitaker was so good in that.

Yes, he was.

Good music, too.

Yeah.

All right.

How did that start?

Weinreich trying to seem less German.

This is the six degrees of that conversation.

Wiener Slave.

Yeah, Wiener Slave.

So here's what

Weinrich.

Wait, there's one other thing that reminds me of, too.

Do you remember we were talking about the Vanity License Plate episode?

Yeah, yeah.

And like 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.

That's the greatest vanity plate anyone's ever had.

Oh, that definitely beats Assman, even.

I think so, too, which is a good one.

Yeah, that's

really funny.

Giz Lord,

especially taking it in the context of originally.

Exactly.

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.

Rolling up to church with Gizlord on your car.

Man.

You can make a movie about that.

Yeah, you could.

With starring Elliot Gould.

Yeah.

Gizlord.

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.

I think there were a lot of tech savvy people who were kind of like

primed to take part in this to begin with.

And I think at first they were adding like 50 new users a day.

Wow.

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 used to screw college kids' parents out of $1,000.

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.

So where'd you go?

I don't remember.

Well, I do remember because i know i went to la for the first time to visit my brother when he lived there nice when i was in college did you go visit the uh six or nine year old cat stevens fan

i did and that was a 75 year old woman wow man that story goes all over the place it took a quite a weird turn but we're still good friends she's still around with us she's 102.

oh really yeah that's cool man does she listen to the podcast or is she like nah only cat stevens all the time that we get kind of old I think.

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, it had a home page.

I went there and I got an error.

Gateway timeout, the old 504, same here.

The old 504.

Yeah,

but it's there.

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

seem to be there.

Sixdegrees.com, sure.

Yeah, I mean, considering the

public knowledge of just that term, it's like you try go to trying going out these days and getting a better domain name, you know.

You can't do it.

You just can't.

Don't feel too bad for Wine Rich or Reich or Rick

because he sold in 1999 for

$125 million in stock options in youth stream media networks.

But this, you know, you know that 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.

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.

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

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Because they were just borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, and that's how they existed.

And then 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, you'll never find that out.

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.

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, Frinster 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.

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 uh, LinkedIn is apparently definitively not built on six 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 Reed Hoffman.

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 Meet Moi as an 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 Mienoi co-founder bought out the business analytics part of their own company and use it to found a data analytics company called Indicative.

Which is still around from what I can tell.

All right.

So maybe he's done all right there.

Yeah.

And so this was, I mean, this was very early 2000s, too.

And they were like they were using like 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 Extefy.

Not a very good name.

You should call it Twitterify.

Yeah, and they had some like high-profile clients.

They had Ritz Carlton, they had Staples, they had Sephora, Publisher's Clearinghouse.

Yeah, so

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.

I mean, did he create that idea?

I wonder?

He gave, or he sold Ecstify 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 like 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.

Maybe if he's listening or if someone knows him through their degrees of connectivity, just get to him and have him email us at stuffpodcast at iHeartMedia.com and just send us your bank statement.

That's right.

So we'll know.

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 is totally nice and inflated and happy and, you know, that he's living a good life.

No, I agree.

I cheapened it by making it financial, and that's why you're the heart of the show.

Yeah, that's me.

I'm the one you're not supposed to touch, remember?

Oh, well, you know what I mean.

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.

Fantastic.

So, Chuck, I think there's that's it for sixdegrees.com.

We got 40 minutes out of it.

Hey, not bad.

Lots of fun stories in the in-between.

Yep.

And what did you just say in between, right?

Well, then that means it's time for listener mail.

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

Yeah, it's amazing.

You never fail each episode.

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.

This was a great email.

It's a great.

This is a Josh Curie did 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 one 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 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.

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.

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?

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 stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts, my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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