Social media day, over half of the world’s population uses them

June 30 was social media

Day, launched for the first time on June 30, 2010 by the American specialized site Mashable, given the impact of these platforms on society and also on the world of work.

Established in 2010, Social Media Day is an anniversary celebrated every year on June 30th. An event initially promoted by Mashable, to reflect on the impact generated by platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok on the ways of interacting globally. Everyone knows these services, but few know what was the first social network in history: it is SixDegrees.

First came SixDegrees

Founded 25 years ago back in 1997, well before more well-known successors such as MySpace, it remained active only until 2000. The original intuition is to be attributed to the American Andrew Weinreich, considered by many to be a pioneer capable of planting the seed of a plant from which others would then have picked the best fruits. The name of the company created to manage the project was MacroView, based in New York.

The name is inspired by the theory of the six degrees of separation formulated in the late 1920s by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy. It argues that any person can be connected to any other individual (or thing) through a chain of knowledge and relationships with no more than five intermediaries. At its peak, SixDegrees employed nearly 100 employees and came to approximately 3.5 million registered users. Not much when compared with the numbers of today's giants, but we must consider that at that time Internet access was a luxury not yet granted to most of us. The real strength compared to other similar projects already online at the time was to be found in the introduction of the concepts of 'profile' and 'friends list', still the basis of social networks today.