Why didn't Myspace become the first big tech giant?
Myspace was one of the first to the social media scene at a large scale, and yet, they are rather irrelevant today. What do you think they did incorrectly that put them in the backseat to other platforms like Facebook and Twitter?
They became a social media site by mistake and probably didn't have the right teams in place to build a platform like FB. Mistake is probably a harsh term. They actually started off as a file sharing site and you could mount their site as a drive on your machine. I had to register all their first domains, including mydiskspace, mylinuxspace, mywindowsspace, and many many others. I remember this because I had to use painful email forms with internic. The first few years were focused around storage optimization. There was no de-duplication and storage became really expensive. I believe this was one of the things sinking them. Eventually they wanted out and they were bought out. They went through significant business model changes and vendor changes prior to their buyout. Becoming a social media site was probably the right direction, but happened a little too late and they were dragging a bit of financial baggage.
I remember many of their features not working at all before they were even bought. Whereas everything Facebook rolls out just works. They famously had a chat feature that never worked for anyone.
Sloppy engineering is common and more acceptable in the enterprise world but unforgivable by consumers when something better comes along.
They sold to News Corp early (2005) for US$580MM and got sucked into the traditional media world.
No significant advertiser revenue.
No dark mode.
They didn’t have a growth team.
Just do what Dropbox and Snap Inc did. Acquire other companies and resist multi-billion dollar takeover attempts yourself.