Salesforce.com was founded in 1999. They've had some of what you quoted for some time. Also note that the Facebook API features you mentioned (FQL & FBML) are now deprecated. I imagine in large part because they were difficult to pull off reliably.
> ... they kept pushing the ball forward rather than to stop and polish what they had...
An API is a contract with your third-party developers. They could have slapped the "beta" label on it (à la Google) and then pointed at that, but they didn't. They put this stuff out there so as to establish a platform for others to build on. It's hard to argue that the foundation for said platform was solid. In school my teachers never gave me better grades when I insisted that my last paper sucked because I was working so hard on making the next one awesome.
> ... but they invented the newsfeed!
So gut check yourself. Is that worth 50+ billion dollars? Novel information displays warm my heart, but this isn't giving anyone a new way to peer into the human body or discover never before seen patterns.
> Their SOA and pipelining of requests is also the first of it's kind.
Have you seen a single thing about Google's infrastructure... ever?
> What they do at scale with a dense social graph seems much much more challenging that what Google did coming up.
Now I think you're trolling. You think it's more challenging to throw together a stream of updates based on a graph that's handed to you versus having to correlate millions (shortly after, billions) of semi-structured documents to answer loosely worded questions?
Mark? Is that you?