The Forgotten Social Network

While we're looking through previous 'could have been facebook' social networks, I remember receiving invites to sixdegrees.com <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com</a><p>This old article from 1998 is worth a look: <a href="http://www.dougbedell.com/sixdegrees1.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dougbedell.com/sixdegrees1.html</a><p>Social recommendation: "You can get a movie review from Siskel and Ebert, but wouldn' t you rather hear it from friends you trust?" he asked."<p>Value in data: "In exchange for traffic at its site, Six Degrees sells advertising on the site and its demographic information compiled from member questionnaires."<p>The wall: "Logging in brings users their own personal bulletin board, where only their first-degree circle may post messages. A powerful internal search engine lets users locate those with similar interests, contact Six Degrees members worldwide and spin out from their sphere of influence. "<p>You can speculate about why it didn't get further. I would speculate the network of people online regularly just wasn't dense enough for adoption, it didn't have the viral hook of signing up to view photoss, and the dense clusters (universities) to grow the network out from.<p>Still, they were thinking far ahead of the game.

Not to take anything away from these guys... but big chunks of what constitutes a "social network" like Facebook go back many more years than this. Go back to the 1980's (at least) and look at folks dialing into BBSs with dial-up modems (acoustic couplers, even!) and phreaks using telco loopback test circuits to set up illicit conference calls, etc. The idea of an online "social circle" was very real back then as well.

"In addition to the Facebook component, Steamtunnels also featured a restaurant guide, events calendar, bulletin board, online radio stations, a textbook price comparison feature and maps of Stanford’s physical steam tunnels on campus, the founders said in a recent interview with The Daily."<p>This is like comparing web portals to Google.

"The founders say that they would have kept trying much harder at the Facebook component if they knew how huge a similar site would become."<p>Everyone would be a millionaire with the benefit of hindsight.

The problem was that they did something unethical: They mass-published pictures of people who didn't approve of it. Facebook.com didn't do that. (I won't get into how many unethical things they DID do, though.) They also published the entire student list as well.<p>Yes, both of those things were publicly available. But much like Google Street View, the fact that they're public doesn't necessarily mean they are easily obtainable, and so people object.

Archive.org has some stuff for steamtunnels.net, but it's pretty thin for 1999:<p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://steamtunnels.net" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://steamtunnels.net</a><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20110112002443/http://www.steamtunnels.net/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20110112002443/http://www.steamtu...</a><p>Too bad - it would have been fun to explore the remnants of this site.

More information on the Steamtunnels / Facebook guys' story has been archived here: <a href="http://steamtunnels.org" rel="nofollow">http://steamtunnels.org</a>

I remember using a social network called Bolt back in '98. People act as if the Internet and social networking is some new thing, it's not.

someone at my high school ran a "social experiment" website called petridish.net back around '98; he didn't have proper backups, and one day it lost a significant chunk of itself. Yet another "also-ran".