alt Hacker NewsI am not referring to MySpace. It was a local-to-my-country social network which was outcompeted by another local-to-my-country social network, which in turn gave way to Facebook.
I was aware of the existence of MySpace at the time, but it never had mainstream adoption locally. We also had not one but two mainstream messaging apps and hardly anyone was using MSN.
Come to think of it, Facebook killed a lot of that homegrown tech.
Early Facebook was inferior to local social networks in many ways. The real killer feature was convincing people to de-anonymize themselves on the internet.