Joltage was forced to shut down in 2003 when the company ran out of funding. In 1997, Andrew Weinreich launched SixDegrees. The online company was the first of its kind to allow users to identify relationships with people they know and then query for people they didn’t know through established connections, based upon the Six degrees of separation theory by Stanley Milgram. Though other services existed with similar features, SixDegrees was the first social media network to allow users to create a profile, show their friends list, and search through their friends list. Weinreich authored the first patent on social networking, “Method and apparatus for constructing a networking database and system,” commonly known as the Six Degrees patent, which secured the social media network's software code. At its height, SixDegrees had close to 100 employees and 3,500,000 fully registered members. The company was sold to YouthStream Media Networks in 1999 for $125 million. The site was closed in 2000. Weinreich later said, in reference to SixDegrees preceding the advent of widespread digital photography, "We had board meetings where we would discuss how to get people to send in their pictures and scan them in. The real difference in 2002 was that by then people had digital cameras." The ‘Six Degrees Patent,’ invented by Andrew Weinreich et al., is considered the definitive patent covering social networking. The patent defined a social network as the ability to see the people you do not know through the people you do know, made possible by indexing people's relationships in a single database. The ‘Location-based services platform patent,’ invented by Andrew Weinreich et al., is a platform providing location-based services and location data to third-party service providers, currently utilized by Xtify.