Thursday, 20 October 2016

Long Island Advertising Agencies: What Was Six Degrees?

By Robert Sutter


Technology is interesting in the sense that every story has a beginning. Social media is no different, especially when discussing the various platforms that have launched and achieved popularity over the years. What you may not know about - and Long Island advertising agencies can tell you all about it - is what's known as the inaugural social media network. Six Degrees is the name and here are a few things that you should know about it.

Six Degrees is regarded, by many, as the first-ever social media website. It launched back in 1997, meaning that it predates Friendster and MySpace, and lasted up until 2001. It allowed users to list people that they know, ranging from friends to family members. While this might seem like a given these days, back then it was a unique feature that no other site seemed to boast. This is just the start to the knowledge that Long Island advertising agencies can pass down.

Companies such as fishbat will tell you that Six Degrees enjoyed a modest amount of success. As a matter of fact, it obtained a few million users, which meant tremendous usage of the feature mentioned earlier. The grown wasn't quite as expansive, though, since not everyone had immediate access to the Internet during that time. Six Degrees also generated more and more spam accounts later on in its life, which didn't exactly help the site in the long run.

Six Degrees was soon sold to YouthStream Media Networks, in 1999, for a total of $125 million. The site itself would ultimately close down in 2001, which ended the first-ever social media site's short run. Maybe Six Degrees would have lasted longer, or perhaps continued to thrive today, if the Internet was more robust back then. The site's features were interesting at the start, but failed to yield consistent engagement. It made sense why Six Degrees would shut its doors.

Even though this is more or less a general overview of Six Degrees, you can clearly see why it matters in the grand scheme of social media. Without it, chances are that we wouldn't have the websites we enjoy now. One can make the argument that Six Degrees is archaic by today's standards, which makes sense given the time it launched. Regardless, this site stands as an interesting piece of history that social media buffs might be interested to learn about.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment