The first true social media site was SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997 by Andrew Weinreich. It was the first service to combine the three features we now consider essential: user profiles, a list of named friends, and the ability to message people across that network. Plenty of things came before it, but none stitched those pieces together first.
What Makes a Site “Social Media” in the First Place?
The phrase gets thrown at everything from forums to dating apps, so the honest answer to “what was first” depends on a working definition. The one most historians settle on has three parts:
- You build a profile that represents you.
- You connect to a list of other named users (friends, contacts).
- You can traverse and communicate across those connections.
Earlier services nailed one or two of these. SixDegrees nailed all three at once, and that combination is what separates social media from email, chat rooms, and personal homepages. If you want the wider context, the internet history timeline tracks how each of these threads converged.
Why SixDegrees.com Gets the Crown
Andrew Weinreich launched SixDegrees in 1997 and named it after the “six degrees of separation” idea — the theory that any two people on Earth are linked through roughly six acquaintances. The site let you list friends, see your friends’ friends, and send messages along those chains. At its peak it claimed somewhere around 3.5 million registered members, though active usage was thinner.
It also did something that sounds mundane now and was radical then: it asked you to use your real identity and your real social graph. That was the conceptual leap. The web had personal homepages going back to the first website in 1991, but a homepage is an island. SixDegrees turned the page into a node.
What About Classmates.com, BBSes, and AOL Profiles?
This is where the arguments start. Several candidates predate 1997, and each falls short on the three-part test.
| Candidate | Year | Why it falls short |
|---|---|---|
| Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) | 1978 onward | Discussion and messaging, but no persistent profiles or articulated friend lists |
| AOL member profiles | early 1990s | Profiles existed, but no public, browsable network of connections |
| Classmates.com | 1995 | Find old schoolmates, but you could not build a visible friend list or freely traverse the graph for years |
Classmates.com is the strongest rival. It launched in 1995, two years before SixDegrees, and it was explicitly about reconnecting with people. But early Classmates was closer to a searchable directory than a social network — you could look people up by school, but the profile-plus-friends-plus-messaging combination that defines the category was not there at launch. That gap is why the “first” title usually goes to SixDegrees instead.
BBSes deserve a nod for inventing online community decades earlier, and AOL normalized the idea of a profile. But community is not the same as a navigable social graph, which is the specific thing SixDegrees built.
What Came After: Friendster, MySpace, Facebook
SixDegrees proved the concept and then the concept outran it. The lineage:
- Friendster (2002) — Made the social graph genuinely fun and grew fast before scaling problems and “fakester” profiles dragged it down.
- MySpace (2003) — Embraced customization, music, and chaos; became the dominant social site of the mid-2000s.
- Facebook (2004) — Started at Harvard, demanded real identity and (initially) a university email, and eventually swallowed the category whole.
Each borrowed the profile-friends-messaging template SixDegrees established. The web that made this possible had been filling in for years — the first photo on the internet and the first YouTube video show how images and video arrived to give all those profiles something to share.
What Happened to SixDegrees?
It is a classic too-early story. SixDegrees was sold to YouthStream Media Networks in 2000 for a reported $125 million, near the top of the dot-com bubble. Within months the site was shut down. The infrastructure of 1999 made it expensive to run, broadband was rare, and most people simply did not yet have enough friends online to connect to. The network effect that makes social media valuable had nothing to feed on.
Weinreich also filed a patent on the social-networking method — building a database of relationships and letting users connect through mutual contacts. The patent was granted in 2001 and later changed hands, surfacing in the patent disputes that followed once social networking became a multi-billion-dollar industry. Being first, it turned out, was worth more in litigation than in 1999 ad revenue.
Was Social Media Inevitable?
Looking back, SixDegrees feels less like an invention and more like a thing waiting to happen. The web had already produced the first email and the first domain name; the plumbing for connecting people was there. What SixDegrees added was the insight that the network itself — who you know, and who they know — could be the product. Everyone since has been refining that one idea.
If you enjoy the “what was first” rabbit hole, the homepage clicker game lets you build the internet from a single click and watch these milestones stack up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was SixDegrees.com really the first social network?
By the standard definition — profiles, friend lists, and messaging across connections — yes, SixDegrees (1997) is generally credited as the first. Earlier services like BBSes and Classmates.com had pieces of the puzzle but not the full combination.
Why did SixDegrees.com fail?
It launched too early. Broadband was rare, server costs were high, and not enough people were online to make the network valuable. It sold for around $125 million in 2000 and shut down shortly afterward.
Who invented SixDegrees.com?
Andrew Weinreich founded SixDegrees.com and launched it in 1997. He also patented the underlying social-networking method, a patent granted in 2001 that later featured in industry disputes.
Was Facebook the first social media site?
No. Facebook launched in 2004, seven years after SixDegrees and after Friendster (2002) and MySpace (2003). Facebook refined and dominated the format rather than inventing it.
What does “six degrees of separation” mean?
It is the theory that any two people on Earth are connected through a chain of roughly six acquaintances. SixDegrees.com was named after it, and the idea is the conceptual backbone of all social networking.