The Problem Isn't Privacy, It's TMI
Alright, I know a lot of people have been complaining about the new Facebook feed thing, saying it destroys any sense of privacy. They don't really mean that. Many of them have called it creepy, which, however, is completely true. And then a completely different group of people, whom think they're so much smarter than everyone else, have pointed out that it can't be about privacy since all the information was already out there. While this latter group is technically right, they're missing the real point.
What the feeds do is completely change the social dynamic of the Facebook community. It used to be, that if you wanted to find something out about a friend or acquaintance, you went and looked for it. If you didn't care, it was easy to ignore. If you wanted to go and be stalker, you could do that too. But now, it's like everyone is being forced to be a stalker. They're being given a lot of information that they never asked for, and it's disturbing. No one wants to be confronted with that. And they don't want to contribute either, for fear of offending others.
It's in our nature to want to simplify, and only pay attention to what's important. When you emphasize too much at once, it becomes much harder to focus on what you're looking for. As far as web sites go, compare the google of today against every other search engine circa 1998. Nuff said.
The Facebook developers said they did this cause they wanted to make it easier to find out what's new. So that instead of searching all of your friends pages, and comparing them against what you remember from last looking, you get all that compressed into one page. If their intentions are such, why not provide a "diff" button, like a wiki? You could even have a "diff all" on the front page, easy and accessible, but still something that you would have to request yourself. And instead of dumping everything recent, it could be customizable, like "single girls" or "people who don't have work or class on Friday". *That* would actually be somewhat useful.
Finally, did you do *any* usability testing on this thing before launching it? I mean, it's not hard to see why this would be a bad idea to begin with.