What Was The First Social Media Platform?

One of the most fascinating lessons a social media manager learns is that whilst the principle of social networking is one that will endure and last, individual platforms have a habit of rising and falling.

Whilst there has been some relative stability in recent years with Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at the centre and a rogue’s gallery of diverse platforms orbiting around them, this is far from the norm and managers are mindful of the need to migrate and adjust.

For example, the first-ever social media platform as we know it lasted only three years but would be hugely influential and patent the concepts that power social media to this day as well as the fundamental idea of using the internet to bring people together as opposed to having different users communicate pseudonymously.

The website SixDegrees.com was the creation of serial entrepreneur Andrew Weinrech and was based on Stanley Milgram’s concept of six degrees of separation, which posits that every person on earth is just six or fewer connections away from each other.

Functionally it worked in a similar way to other social media platforms in that you could add and invite friends to the website, list them by whether they are a friend, family member or acquaintance, send instant messages to them, upload images and post on bulletin boards.

People in the first, second or third degree of separation could then see these links, increasing opportunities for communication and making friends.

A lot of these features are common in social media now, and even back then chat rooms, message boards and BBS terminals were common forms of communication.

However, what was different is that whilst the rest of the internet expected people to create an identity for themselves, SixDegrees was based on people using their real names.

By 2000, the site had over three million users and had been sold at the height of the dot-com boom to Youthstream Media Networks in late 1999.

Like many early social media websites, however, it had no idea how to make money from its users and when the bubble burst in 2000 SixDegrees shut down.