From my ignorant point of view Microsoft had in its very own hands a solid competitor to Facebook but ended doing absolutely nothing with it.

I still can recall the MSN/Hotmail profiles - it was kind of a news feed that recorded all your statuses from MSN (or you could add your own there). Your contacts could add comments on those. I think at some point you could add posts with pictures too.

But all of that just disappeared when they ditched MSN.

They could’ve beat Facebook in its own game easily, as they had the advantage of their username - but somehow they missed on that too.