Is Facebook the new Yahoo?

Facebook's acquisition strategy has always been to buy start-ups, shut them down and keep the talent. Obviously they must have other plans for instagram, the mobile photo-sharing app they just bought for 1 billion dollars. Emil Protalinski, on ZDNet, compared the acquisition to Google's takeover of Youtube. Back then people also wondered how Google was going to monetize Youtube. IMO, the instagram deal reminds me of Yahoo's acquisition of Geocities. Yahoo paid 1 billion dollars for Geocities and in the end the only ones who ever made money off of Geocities were affiliate marketeers who used it to host their sites for free.