If you don't want your past on the timeline, remove it. It's that simple. This isn't adding any new functionality to Facebook, it's just presenting it differently.
Personally, I love how easy the timeline makes it to jump back to my freshman year of college. I can see how much I've changed as a person for better or worse. It's like an excellent scrapbook of my life and I'm happy to have it.
FTFA: "And if you have been even partially active on Facebook for the past few years, there is simply way too much of it to possibly delete manually. There is no button to simply “delete all” (trust me, I’ve looked)."
Tell me about it. I had to spend the better part of a day anonymizing my Quora profile, because their concept of private profiles seems like something the founders brought over from their stint at Facebook. Even so, it seems like there is still some history in my EDITS tab that I have no idea how to hide or purge.
Back when I decided to do over my Twitter profile, I used the API to automate the deletion of all my tweets. Any other way would be impossible.
Yes, it's still as hard as before to remove content.
But I don't see how "improving content discoverability" is suddenly a bad thing on Facebook? Yes, Timeline makes it easier to find old stuff, but on HN aren't we always looking for users to be able to access and discover content as easily as possible?
From the comments there, it sounds like the real API might limit you to deleting messages created by your own app. Somebody also posted a Javascript solution where you double-click the 'delete' button to delete all older posts, but I'm not sure if it will work since the version information says "obsolete" in it.
Are there any tools for doing that in bulk? It will take me ages to remove all my posts for a single year in the past if I'm to delete them one by one.
Personally, I love how easy the timeline makes it to jump back to my freshman year of college. I can see how much I've changed as a person for better or worse. It's like an excellent scrapbook of my life and I'm happy to have it.