SDOKB (Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon) Platform

The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon platform is later-stage project within the Project: Strands. Like ScreenPlayMate and ReelCred, this application can serve as a stand-alone service when fully developed. Here, we are considering building an MVP of SDOKB to facilitate the promotion of the Strands project, in particular, promoting it to identified contributors.

SDOKB is essentially a social media tool that helps people intentionally connect with the specific people they need to connect with based on the assumption that a personal, purposeful introduction is the best way to make contact. It rests on the fundamental premis of SDOKB, that there are at most six people connections between you and anyone else in the world — including Kevin Bacon.

For example, say you’re a regular person trying to launch a collaborative, crowdsourced, crowdfunded media development project, and you wanted to connect with screenplay writers and filmmakers who focus on your genre, (let’s say, sci-fi action adventure), or even a famous actor, like Kevin Bacon.

Finding those people through the social networks is simple enough with API access. But reaching out to them in a way that your message gets through their filters? That’s quite another matter. That’s where SDOKB comes in. 

SDOKB has global database of all the connections among people as far as can be gleaned from the APIs of Facebook, LinkedIn, X, etc. AI is used to read through people’s posts and assess as closely as possible the nature of peoples’ relationships. Are they very close, like spouses or business partners? Or are they merely acquaintances?

With this information available, the key objective is to help you find the best, most direct route to that other person, based on the relationships of people in between. It could be that your brother-in-law is old childhood friends with the person who is now Kevin Bacon’s gardener. But maybe there is a better path to Kevin Bacon. Maybe your wife’s previous boss knows a business executive who has the same lawyer as Kevin Bacon. Chances are, there are many different paths between you and Kevin Bacon. The job of SDOKB is to help you determine exactly what the best path is for your intention. 

BTW, this is another one of my brainstorms from many years ago, since before MySpace. I was inspired by one of the first social media companies ever launched, sixdegrees.com. They did not have the same model as I just described. I evolved my model based on what I thought I needed to get connected with the right people.

Note: There are currently no functional specs for this application. We will pick this up when the other development projects are completed.