I'd say it's the opposite, it's made them very expensive to acquire. It's not inconceivable that with the right team and a very impressive tech demo Facebook might have been prepared to sink >$41 million into a strategic aqui-hire at a very early stage.
Now to give the VCs a return on their investment they're probably expected to exit at north of a billion, which means they're going to have to show Facebook something special in terms of revenue or user-interaction generation or targeting they can't get from any of the many other smart developers who've taken less funding for their location startups.
I'm not sure Facebook's investors would be happy with $400MM in pre-IPO shares, except in the unlikely event the service is generating significant revenue per user or bigger than all their location-based competitors before Facebook IPOs. I believe that's double Y Combinator's biggest exit, so it's not as if you can't pick up great hackers with great products and actual revenues for a lot less, and with pre-profit location-based startups being not-exactly-unfashionable at the moment Facebook are spoilt for choice if they want to make strategic acquisitions in that space.
I think Color have committed themselves to trying to build something big enough to be considered a Facebook alternative. Taking $41 million in a Series A buys you a lot of premature optimisation or a lot of runway if you don't think you're going to get a better valuation in a series B round. It also more or less rules out the quick exit.
Now to give the VCs a return on their investment they're probably expected to exit at north of a billion, which means they're going to have to show Facebook something special in terms of revenue or user-interaction generation or targeting they can't get from any of the many other smart developers who've taken less funding for their location startups.