I was not aware that a single tweet by Mike Isaac, who has a tendency to be extremely snarky about everything, represented the feelings of everyone on Twitter.

Don't get me wrong, Isaac is right a lot, but he's also wrong a lot, and from what I can see: https://twitter.com/search?q=facebook%20acquires&src=typd the reception to this acquisition is mostly positive.

I think this is genius on Facebook's part, they know that what we know today as Facebook isn't going to be popular forever, eventually something cooler will come along and enough people will switch that Facebook becomes more or less irrelevant. But if Facebook the company just keeps buying the next new thing then whenever one actually hits it big they won't be losing users, their users will just be switching from their legacy product to their newer product.

If MySpace had bought out Facebook during the early years and just let them keep doing their thing their fate might have been different. Yeah, people would have still moved to Facebook but MySpace (the company) would have still been the one to profit.

Yeah Facebook is going to have a ton of misses with this strategy, but if it helps their long term prospects it'll be worth it.

Or, Friendster not selling their patents to Facebook, and instead collecting license fees from Facebook and others.

The same people said the same thing about Instagram and WhatsApp.

I thought one of the main things about Whatsapp was the huge audience and the demographics of that audience skewed young, and this app while not quite the install base size of Whatsapp/Instagram is ppoular with young folks. The demographics is the one they teach in Psych 101 as the most crucial point at which marketing can influence lifelong brand choices. The tweet snark seems to miss the point altogether.

Did they? I remember people balking at the price of Whatsapp but not the actual of buying it, it was widely seen as a huge benefit to Facebook.

Well, that's ironic.