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Hello Patreon, and welcome into the 4th Hidden Track Bonus podcast here for my Patreon subscribers.
This is a bite size mini podcast where I do a deep dive into a topic I've spoken about previously on the main podcast, typically in a list segment or a top five segment.
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These topics needed a little more fleshing out, a little more love, and that's what we do here.
These are a lot of fun and a lot of random.
I've got a list currently of almost 50 topics that I can talk about.
They basically range from anything you could think of that I've spoken about on the podcast before.
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What we're going to do with this podcast is we're going to look back at two of the Ogs of social media, Friendster and Six Degrees, one of which I had an account for and one of which I didn't hear about until long after it was basically obsolete.
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It's amazing to think that social media has been around now for almost 30 years.
There are a lot of people that don't know the world without social media, Internet, smartphones.
I'm old enough to remember when you got on the dial up Internet and you had AOL chat rooms and instant messaging and that was kind of the way you interacted with people.
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You were still connected to people all over the world, but it was nothing like it is now.
All of my social media accounts, Instagram, TikTok, threads, they're all public because of being an author, podcaster, writer.
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Like I'm trying to promote my brand and it's hard to do if you have a private account.
But what that means is that anybody on this planet with Internet can find me and comment on my posts, which is just fascinating.
I'm Gen.
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XI, grew up in a time when you had phone numbers written in a little book next to your phone, a corded phone that was either in the living room or kitchen, or if you were lucky, you had it in your bedroom.
So I'm old enough to remember when connection was a lot more intimate.
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Then my family got the Internet in probably early 1996, like the halfway point of my senior year of high school, and it was a lot different.
We had a gateway computer with a monitor weighed probably 40 lbs.
Dial up Internet where someone could pick up the phone and throw you off the Internet.
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You could go surf the web and you could go to different websites.
But as far as your social experience, it was I mentioned AOL chat rooms, Usenet groups, message boards, e-mail lists.
You might have had an early personal home page on Geocities or Angel Fire.
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You had AIM ICQ.
The difference was it was a social experience, but not a social network.
What was missing at the time was the social graph.
That is the structured map of who knows who.
That is what the websites we're going to talk about.
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This time on the podcast introduced 6° and Friendster introduce the social graph and that single concept became the backbone of every social media platform that followed. 6° came out in 199729 years ago.
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Social media was born.
It was built around the famous social theory.
Any person on earth is connected to any other person through a chain of about 6 relationships.
There's the famous 6° of Kevin Bacon that we're all connected to him through that same chain.
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The Six Degrees idea had been around in sociology for decades, but it was the late 90s Internet that made it suddenly feel possible that you could test it out.
So 6°.com came out in 1997.
What did it let you do?
You could do things that are common now.
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Create a profile, list your friends, see friends of friends, message people, browse through connections.
I'm telling you this now, and you're like, duh, that's every social media network, but we're talking 1997.
They were still releasing movies on VHS back then.
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In 97, most of the people on the Internet were just trying to figure out how to do e-mail correctly and not download viruses. 6° was revolutionary because it combined personal identity, explicit friend connections, network browsing and communication tools.
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Those combinations.
It's the backbone of every site, Facebook, LinkedIn, everything.
So I'm here describing to you 6° and you're thinking, wow, why aren't they still around?
Why aren't they as big as Facebook or Instagram?
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That's because of timing.
The Internet population in 1997 through 99 wasn't large enough to support the idea of social networking.
It was not the world like now, where approximately 74% of the global population has Internet access.
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That's about 6 billion people.
In 1997, that number was approximately 18% of US households had Internet, which actually makes me feel really good about my family, that we were one of 18%.
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With the Internet being so revolutionary then, most people didn't have broadband Internet.
Most people didn't spend their lives online or weren't comfortable sharing that information with the public.
Like I said, I've got all of my profiles open so I can promote my books and my podcasts, but I also do share things with my private life and I'm very cautious of what I share.
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I basically look at it as I'm not going to share anything that I'm not comfortable with the world seeing.
But also 6° was pushing for real identity and real relationships where back in the day then the culture of the Internet was more anonymity, pseudonyms, separating your online life from real life.
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Think about it, those of you that are old enough, how many of you that were in chat rooms back then used your real name?
I'm guessing none of you.
So for as revolutionary of an idea as 6° was, it was basically the idea that was put out into the universe and then carried on by other companies because it grew big for its era.
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But it didn't become a permanent fixture.
It was sold and later shut down, but it laid the groundwork for what came after.
And that was Friendster.
Friendster is the first social media site that I ever had a profile on.
They came out in 2002 and it was the first true social media phenomenon.
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For a short time in O2, O3, it was the hottest website on earth, which is why I wanted to be a part of it.
It was actually my friend Barry that he was on it and he said you should go join this site called Friendster.
I'm like, what the hell is that?
And it was the idea of connecting with everybody.
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I didn't know really what social networking was, but the fact that you could go to this website and connect with anybody else that wanted to be on there was very interesting because even back then I was a writer, but it was more poetry.
But you never know.
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You connect with the right other poets and you're suddenly, I don't know, there's not really any celebrity poets.
But still, the idea was networking.
In just those five years, from when 6° opened to when Friendster came up, the Internet had changed dramatically.
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Many more households had Internet.
Broadband was growing.
People were spending more time online.
You had digital cameras becoming common.
Blogs were starting.
Online dating sites were starting.
I said a minute ago, 18% of US households had access to the Internet in 97.
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That number jumped to 59% in 2002.
So Friendster was the right site at the right time.
It combined all the stuff that you would think profiles, friends lists, messaging, photo sharing.
You had testimonials, which were like comments or endorsements, but it was a focus on meeting people.
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Friendster was often described as a social network mixed with a dating site, mixed with a popularity contest.
And that, I mean, it talks about a lot of social media.
How many people do you know on social media that post only the worst parts of their life?
It's basically like the shiniest, greatest hits they could possibly come up with, which is terrible For others that look at that and think that's the gold standard for themselves.
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I should talk.
I mean, I'm not going to post videos of me falling down the stairs or anything.
It's going to be me doing a perfect backflip if I ever could.
The secret weapon of Friendster was social discovery.
It wasn't just having friends.
It was the fact that you could browse friends of friends to meet new people with a level of trust.
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I could say, oh, you know Barry, you must be cool.
And then he could look at me and say, oh, you know, Chris, you must be crazy, too.
It gave a level of trust and legitimacy when early Internet was so sketchy.
I mean, it still is to a point.
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But back then, where everybody had fake names, you figure that whoever you were talking to would Shank you in a back alley if you ever met him for the good that it created.
Friendster was also the first platform that created the social media behavior.
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That's where people began to obsess over the profile pictures, curate their identity, chase clout and friends lists, try to appear cool, get jealous of who was connected to who, using their platform for status.
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I fall victim to that as much as anyone else on Instagram.
If I get people that follow me, I look at them and see their number of followers and see who else follows them, and I'm like, well, they might be someone worth putting in my circle.
This is also where you saw the rise of fake profiles, where people started to create fake ones, not necessarily to scam people, but sometimes to be funny, creative or in character.
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Where people made profiles for celebrities, fictional characters, bands, pets.
Friendster did not encourage this.
They wanted real world identity and that led to one of the earliest conflicts in social media history.
Is social media about real identity or performance?
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That's where you see today on social media, a lot of real name policies, verification badges.
But what happened to Friendster?
Unfortunately, as it grew, it became slow.
The site struggled with scaling, database performance, server load, and once a social media site feels slow, people just leave.
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Friendster's crackdown on fake or joke profiles alienated some users that like that creative culture.
But the third and probably the biggest reason that Friendster collapsed was the other social media networks that came up.
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They saw the opportunity and they came in with better technology, design, user experience, fewer restrictions.
That's where we get into Myspace.
That was the first social media network where I really dug in deep.
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Being on there several times a day, loads of photos interacting, the top 8 lists.
I'll do a bigger segment on Myspace, probably on the main podcast at some point in the future.
Then you had Facebook come along and friends there suddenly became the old and obsolete website really fast.
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Social media networks like 6° in Friendster, they're part of the second phase of social media history, with phase one being online communities like forums and AOL chat rooms.
The second phase was 6° Friendster, Myspace, LinkedIn, Facebook.
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Now, the current third phase of social media is the algorithmic social media.
This is where the social graph matters less than content distribution.
I focus a lot on Instagram and Tiktok, just getting something on their daily to keep me fresh in the algorithm.
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It's the same on Twitter or X if you're on that garbage site still.
YouTube, Facebook's news feed.
Starting to sum it up here on this episode, 6° invented the structure of social media with profiles, friends lists, degrees of separation, whereas Friendster invented the culture of social media, with people treating online identity as a performance, a brand, a social competition.
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But Friendster also showed that a social platform can die shockingly fast, even if it's huge, beloved, and feels unstoppable at its peak.
I never thought Myspace would just pop like a balloon, but both 6° and Friendster demonstrated one of the most important laws of the Internet that social networks tend to become.
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The winner takes most because your friends are already there.
Switching costs are high.
Attention is limited.
Friendster lost because Myspace and Facebook offered the same basic idea but just executed better.
Once I left Friendster for Myspace, I never went back and then I went to Facebook in 2007 and split my time with Facebook and Myspace for a couple of years before migrating totally to Facebook in probably 2010.
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So to sum it up, 6°, it was ahead of its time and the world wasn't ready and Friendster.
The world was ready but the tech and strategy wasn't.
And that is the story of the 1st 2 social media sites, 6° and Friendster.
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It is amazing, like I said, to think that 6° came out almost 30 years ago.
Did any of you have profiles on 6° or Friendster?
Just remember, even though those seem like ancient dinosaurs, they set the table for everything that's out there today.
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But that'll wrap up the 4th Hidden Tracks podcast, the story of 6° and Friendster, the Ogs of social media.
Thank you all for tuning in.
I have said these podcasts would be short.
I had said 10 to 15 minutes.
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This one is going to come in at over 15 minutes.
But I am trying to keep these under control.
Nice bite-sized podcasts.
And I'll be back again with another Hidden Track podcast at some point in the future.
But until that time comes, I am Christopher Setterlund, and I'll see you next time, Patreon.
