What do you think would happen most of the time if these acquihires didn't happen? The companies would just go out of business and the services would be shut down anyway.
I'm with the GP poster -while I probably would do the same thing in an acquihire situation, it does start to (somewhat) poison the well over time for newer startups.
While I love Path to bits - I have zero clue what their business model will be, and wonder what will happen to all my carefully journaled "moments" if Path gets acquhired sometime in the future. Somebody needs to come up with a good Diaspora like solution for personal journaling where _i_ control the data, and store it on something that is likely to be persistent (S3 is the only thing that I can think of that has a greater than 90% chance of being around in 10+ years. Dropbox, if they have good public offering, will likely be the second candidate)
I'd pay money for that - $10 for a Dropbox/S3 storage social network akin to what we get with Path today.
For your question about a place to store all of your data, check out: http://lockerproject.org/. While it doesn't support Path yet (they don't have a public API) it certainly will when Path makes their API available.
Also as someone else said they've turned down very large offers.
S3 is the only thing that I can think of that has a greater
than 90% chance of being around in 10+ years.
I think a site that acts as a reseller/affiliate for pair.com, dropbox and the like, where all you do is set up someone's (new) domain, connect it to the storage provider, and provide an easy install of something jekyll-like and turnkey would be a good thing to try.
At first you'd only get people who are aware of the user-as-a-product issue with Google and other free providers, but as those providers are more widely recognized as problematic, the market will increase.