Oh how the mighty have fallen. Remember when Myspace was turning over close to $1 billion in revenue and was more popular than Google?

Today, Myspace raises nostalgia from 2006, to a happier time when ‘Badgers’ was the greatest web video ever made, Internet Explorer had 50% of the total browser market share, and experts thought web 2.0 meant, ‘better spam mail’ (not a joke, that actually happened). Myspace brings back the same emotions as your great grandfather’s Model T.

But at the time, Myspace was not just a big part of social media, it WAS social media. Like the Model T, it was so innovative, so unique, and so all round world shattering in its day that we can’t really imagine what a world would have looked like without Myspace.

So what were the factors that destroyed the company? Will it ever come back? And what can we do to avoid a second Myspace tragedy? Well the first thing to remember is that many of Myspace’s problems will never occur again. These include:

1. Self-built programs.  Facebook and other developers give third parties the ability to create applications, because these developers have realized that any programmer writing a new product was not writing code to keep the main site working well. Myspace never understood this. And by creating a huge selection of applications and programs but not paying attention to their core service, it caused the service to age faster than normal and eventually go out of date.

2. Picking the wrong site architecture. Contrary to popular opinion, Facebook does not constantly redesign its home pages to irritate its users. It does it to keep from going obsolete, and keep up user engagement. But changing home pages means making changes to the architecture, which takes time, engineers and money. Myspace compounded the problem by using a program called ColdFusion to build the original site. Coldfusion was powerful enough to build the site in 10 days, but by 2005, the program was obsolete and did not allow developers the ability to fix it.

However, there are some factors which we may see happen to current large players in the next few years, if not sooner:

1. Arrogance. Both Twitter and Facebook seem to be functioning as if no other service could possibly replace them. Myspace once had the attitude that nothing could replace them and that, no matter how many bad reports came in, the site was still worth billions.

2. Revenue targets set by those who don’t understand the product. Myspace began running so many ads that it became cluttered. So cluttered in fact that many switched to Facebook. Now that Facebook is running more and more ads, and also beginning to charge for promoted posts and to advertise favorite pages on behalf of large companies, we may see some disengagement as well.

3. Bad Data. One of the things that killed Myspace was that, while its site suffered from serious problems, the site was also winning over hundreds of thousands of users a day. Those numbers tend to distract from useful data (such as, number of active accounts). And social media firms are new types of business. It will be a while before we find out which are the real numbers for determining success.

Myspace has recently undergone its third redesign, but it’s unlikely to reclaim any ground, mainly because it offers nothing new. The question is: will Facebook collapse in the face of a new social network? And the answer: probably not. Facebook has done well in learning the mistakes of the former social media king.

Can you name any other problems that killed Myspace? Would you ever try it out again?