I'm pretty impressed. It looks cool, but actually seeing it with your own data is neat - it's like taking a trip back in time. So many things I've forgotten about!

You may like intersect.com which has been around for about a year. You can "scroll through" your life using a timeline control or through various "storylines." Nicely crafted site.

I followed these steps and it worked (cool, I guess) but then I was instantly faced with some old conversations and relationships that I didn't want on my wall. It appears that Timeline doesn't respect the Block settings already in place...

I've since turned Timeline off again, but I'm afraid it will instantly turn back on next week when this goes public. Does anyone know if this is the case? Or will Timeline be an opt-in only option?

Everyone will be getting Timeline, but if you'd like to send me a more detailed email, I can file a bug for you.

[username]@gmail.com

Or: "How to prompt Facebook to fix this immediately"

Not necessarily. Seems a smart way to get developers to verify their account and run through the app creation process.

That's exactly what it is. Looks like it will be live for everyone next week. Once you make the change and publish it, however, it's only available to other Dev-enabled FB profiles to see. Everyone else still sees the old profile.

Note: If you remove the action from one of your apps, the timeline goes away, as well.

Off topic but unsure where to post:

How do I reach facebook with a security problem that I don't want to post publicly? Is there an email address or can someone contact me? (email in profile)

I "Liked" and commented on status updates that showed up on my wall before that was an actual feature, but the friends whose updates I acted on didn't get a notification. Will this be the case for when the timeline goes live?

I also noticed that you can arbitrarily add events to any point in your timeline. So I guess FB is aiming to be a retrospective diary, too.

Seems very similar to http://erly.com, a startup that just launched a couple weeks ago. The difference is that Facebook builds an automatic timeline from your data and erly you have to import everything manually from Facebook.

And adding my phone number / credit card to 'verify' my account will aide in creating an app how?

It's like a captcha. You have no idea how many spammers and scammers want to attack Facebook users and their data via trojan horse apps. Srsly. For a taste, here's a paper by the FB security team:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ldg/a10-stein.p...

I'm not much of a fan of Techcrunch and their articles (same with Mashable at times; I have my reasons), but this was great. I'll give Techcrunch another shot at my news reading attention just because of this tut. :)

Just a warning: the mobile app stopped being able to receive notifications, which seems strange that it would be affected

The instructions have you create your own application so unless you plan on stealing your own data you privacy will be fine.