To be fair, it’s not so much like Myspace as Myspace is like it, and then not really. It’s cleaner, better looking, easier to customize (well), better for handling actual content, and much less likely to crash one’s computer than Myspace. I think of Myspace and LJ as similar to AOL versus the rest of the web browsers/general internet in the early days (myspace being AOL). I still don’t understand how Myspace is so popular (well, I do, but it’s not a happy explanation).
About the predecessors - editthispage.com was a weblog system that was around before livejournal, I’m pretty sure. I still have an archaic few entries on there from introducing weblogs to internet classroom students as the ‘next big thing’, before it was called blogging, which I still try to refuse to call it.
As for waiting for something to happen, one generally has to make their own thing happen on live journal. Join interest communities and participate, start writing or photologging, make some connections, etc. I started mine way back when, got bored with it when I didn’t get many responses and abandoned it, came back a year or two later and started posting more things with special interest appeal, and now have a good number of friends and comments, a pretty interesting friendslist read every morning, and an interesting sense of community (and it’s good for advertising things I’m selling or doing).
Ohhh, THAT’s who you are.
I write in mine at least once each weekday, unless something disrupts my schedule severely. None of my entries are private or friendslocked - they vary between utterly mundane and somewhat amusing.
I also enjoy LiveJournal-based roleplaying - many, many communities exist. Soem are dedicated to specific fictional universes, some are more… muddled.
Yep: my earliest LJ entries are all private, because I was just using it as a personal journal. It’s only been in the past 6 months or so that I’ve started making regular public entries, friending people, joining communities, etc. My “circle” is still pretty small, but the more I use LJ the more I like it.
That’s funny, the same thing happened to me! 
My livejournal is friends-only basically because what I write is so dull that I figure only people who actually like me would want to read it. I’m not a pain about friending people, though, as long as I have some idea of who they are. My livejournal friends are divided into various groups–real-life friends (my former college roommates and classmates), Dopers, and members of another message board. The non-Doper board recently underwent (more like suffered) a major restructuring and, as a result, several members there don’t really feel that comfortable there anymore. So they’re posting more in their livejournals, and several people who didn’t have them before have started them.
Heh…sorry. 
Is this because you generally have 20 friends on LJ instead of 200, a dangerous dearth of annoying advertisements, or because there’s actual interesting content and community to be found?
As fellow doper av8rmike described it: think of it as your own personal MPSIMS. Well said.