Social network service

The social network emerged not from a technological breakthrough but from the collision of a psychological insight and adequate infrastructure. In 1997, when Andrew Weinreich founded SixDegrees.com in New York, he was translating Stanley Milgram's famous "six degrees of separation" experiment into software. The premise: everyone on Earth is connected through a chain of six or fewer acquaintances. The technology finally existed to map those chains.

SixDegrees allowed users to create profiles, list friends and family members (whether registered or not), and see their connections to other users up to three degrees out. You could send messages to people in your extended network, bridging social distance that had previously been invisible. By 1999, the platform had 3.5 million registered users and 100 employees. Weinreich had demonstrated product-market fit for a new category.

But the conditions that enabled SixDegrees also constrained it. Dial-up internet maxed out at 56 kbps. Digital cameras cost $750 and produced images few could upload. Profile pictures were practically impossible—users could not show themselves. The fundamental appeal of social networking, seeing and being seen, was technologically blocked. Weinreich sold the company in 1999 for $125 million in stock options, value that evaporated in the dot-com crash. He later sold the social networking patent for $700,000 to Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, who would use those insights to build LinkedIn and Tribe.net.

The failure of SixDegrees and its successors Friendster and Myspace reveals how network effects interact with infrastructure readiness. Each platform found millions of users but could not sustain engagement without rich media capabilities. Facebook emerged in 2004 when broadband penetration had reached critical mass, digital cameras were standard on phones, and users could finally share the visual content that makes social networking compelling.

The social network was not waiting for Mark Zuckerberg—it was waiting for broadband, cheap digital photography, and mobile internet. SixDegrees proved the concept seven years early. The infrastructure proved the concept made sense. The gap between idea and execution measured exactly the time required for network speeds, camera ubiquity, and always-on connectivity to reach threshold levels. The conditions create the invention; the invention waits for the conditions.