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.