They had the news feed back then too, although it looked very differently. The two major differences between fb and myspace was the forced layout and that you didn't have to browse the site to see if there were updates on friends walls.

The major difference is what people are posting, and how tangentially related to your network, the posts on your newsfeed are.

Back then celebrities and news media weren't part of the platform, so you didn't really have these major intersections in the graph. I also believe that you had to re-share in order to push a post into a node that isn't directly connected to the posts author. Today a like is enough.

The reason why facebook is uncool now, is a mix between who the active users are, and how much room and focus facebook puts on links to newssite and posts by people who aren't your friends.