NEW YORK (AP) - The idea that everyone is connected within "six degrees of separation" has become familiar, carrying with it the tantalizing idea of one world, mankind as one big family.
It has been the theme of a play and a movie, and the gimmick of a parlor game. And now a company is working to prove it's a small World Wide Web after all, too.
Sixdegrees.com runs a Web site devoted to networking everyone, and it's expanding Tuesday.
The way it works is a person registers at the site and lists up to 10 friends. Those friends are supposed to join and list 10 friends each of their own, and so on. It can be used for apartment searches, job hunts, quests for medical specialists or lawyers, even finding old high school chums.
In short, anyone who has asked a friend, "Hey, do you know someone who..." will understand the concept.
Formerly limited to the friends of friends - two degrees of separation - users will now be able to find links between every other member, whether that link is three, 12 or 64 degrees of separation.
Andrew Weinreich, CEO of sixdegrees.com, started the company in January 1997 with a small ceremony in which he listed five employees and two other people in his initial set of contacts. Today, there are more than 1 million members all leading back in some way to Weinreich and his seven initial contacts. And the database is growing by 10,000 and 12,000 names a day, he said.
Such a "personal virtual community," as Weinreich calls his first few members, is the key to sixdegrees.com. "These are the people I care to interact with," he said. "These are also the people who I care about what they think about the president."
Other Web communities are often organized around common interests: Get all the golfers together and let them talk about golf. Same for neurosurgeons or beekeepers. Instead of communities defined by what is being talked about, sixdegrees.com instead defines community by who is doing the talking.
"There's very much a social aspect to it," said Quinn Heraty, a law student and legal assistant at Lehman Brothers investment bank. "Other friends have said if they travel they would contact people in the area and socialize."
Heraty has been a member since July 1998. Besides networking, sixdegrees.com gives her a continuously updated contact list of friends' addresses.
This is the use favored by Witold Riedel, 28, a freelance graphic designer in New York.
He adds to the database any friend he thinks might disappear from his life, and says he has used the service to help friends locate apartments and even find wallpaper pattern makers.
Still, others aren't sold on the service.
Some, like David Cantrell, a software developer in London, say they don't need sixdegrees.com.
"I'd rather keep my list of friends/acquaintances/business partners private," Cantrell said. "I find real face-to-face networking over a beer to be perfectly effective."
Privacy was mentioned by several sixdegrees.com members as a concern, although Nicole Berlyn, director of marketing and advertising, said the company would only give advertisers general demographic data.
"We don't rent, sell, give or show individuals' data," she said.
Some people invited to join refused, saying they were wary of receiving unsolicited bulk e-mail - known as "spam." Others suspected they were being made part of a marketing scheme, or were simply uninterested in being contacted by the friend of their cousin's dentist.
Weinreich is convinced, however, that if he provides the Web site, people will use it.
Art Bushkin is the president of Pace Financial Network, a Vienna, Va.-based company putting financial services on the Web. He was invited to join by Robert Lessin, now the chairman of Wit Capital. He said he initially felt flattered to be asked to join by someone he didn't know well. He tried it out and signed up.
"I had agreed to participate in an online form of networking that I would have probably found embarrassing had I been at a cocktail party," he said. "It was an interesting way for us to connect that wouldn't have happened in any other medium."