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For those not familiar with the concept of six degrees of separation, here's a quick explanation: the idea is that if you look at your friends, and their friends, and their friends' friends, you'll only have to do 6 such steps to reach any person on Earth. As they say, it's a small world.
Now, the folks from a startup called Tagiton are trying to apply this principle to e-mail (skip to the embedded video below for a visual explanation). Unfortunately, there's a whole lot of things that are wrong with their approach. First and most importantly, LinkedIn is already doing it, and they offer a lot more than this feature, while Tagiton pretty much relies on organizing your e-mail conversations through tags and simple communication with your 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree friends.
There's an unwritten rule that says the following: when you start a business, make sure that a bigger company can't easily replicate whatever you're doing. A corollary to that rule, I guess, would be: don't do something that a bigger company has already done.
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Add to that the fact that Tagiton is generally scarce on features, and that an important feature - importing contacts from your existing e-mail accounts such as Yahoo or Gmail - doesn't work yet, it makes for a pretty poor experience. The "six degrees of separation" idea sounds promising, but I reckon there are better ways of applying it to social networking and online communication.