SixDegrees and a little on the history of social networks

-I found out about this on page 109 of 'Taken out of context' paper by Danah Boyd
-The first recognised social network site 1997-2001

I am curious as to why it ended up not working after 4 years and why other sites are successful. Myspace was extremely popular a few years back but it has now been overtaken by facebook. I wonder what it would take for a new site to become the forerunner or if facebook will continue its' success.
The concept of an online community was subsequently implemented by livejournal and cyworld among others.
This idea has been taken on by online matchmaking services such as match.com which would probably create a better sense of realism and community
It seems that where a site makes a mistake i.e. subcription fees, removing profiles for being against their ideal, a new site takes over and capitalises on this greatly. This competition probably forces a lot of change and the development and testing of lots of new ideas
From the Danah essay, it seems that originally social networks were aimed at older audiences, but as the tools available changed, the audience did too.

-Definition on wikipedia of SixDegrees.com:

SixDegrees.com was a social network service website that lasted from 1997 to 2001 and was based on the Web of Contacts model of social networking. It was named after the six degrees of separation concept and allowed users to list friends, family members and acquaintances both on the site and externally; external contacts were invited to join the site. Users could send messages and post bulletin board items to people in their first, second, and third degrees, and see their connection to any other user on the site. It was one of the first manifestations of a social networking websites in the format now seen today. Six Degrees was followed by more successful social networking sites based on the "Social-circles network model" such as Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, XING and Facebook.

People who confirmed a relationship with an existing user but did not go on to register with the site continued to receive occasional email updates and solicitations.

MacroView (later renamed to SixDegrees), the company that developed the site, was founded by CEO Andrew Weinreich and was based in New York City. At its height, SixDegrees had around 100 employees, and the site had around 1,000,000 fully-registered members. The site was bought by YouthStream Media Networks in 2000 for US$125 million.