Vendor lineage
SixDegrees.com
The first social network, and it failed because not enough people were online yet.
SixDegrees.com is widely recognised as the first social networking site: the first to combine a user profile, a visible friends list, and the ability to browse other people's connections. Andrew Weinreich founded it in May 1996 and launched it in 1997, naming it after the six-degrees-of-separation idea.
The features are unremarkable now because everything copied them. Users could create a profile, list friends and family, invite people who were not yet members, send messages, and post to people in their first, second and third degrees - and, unusually, see how they were connected to any other member.
Weinreich filed the first patent on social networking, 'Method and apparatus for constructing a networking database and system', which is generally known as the Six Degrees patent.
It reached around 3.5 million users, which sounds like success and was not enough. The problem was structural: a social network is only useful if the people you know are on it, and in the late 1990s most people were not online at all. Millions of users spread across a world that was barely connected produced little engagement.
It was sold to YouthStream Media Networks in December 2000 and shut down in 2001 - three years before Facebook. The idea was correct and the infrastructure had not arrived, which is a different kind of failure from AltaVista's and worth keeping alongside it.