[javagram]

I don't know. At the time the Newsfeed was introduced (September 2006), Facebook was not the juggernaut it was today. There were other countries with social networks that had much stronger network effects locally (e.g. Orkut).

Facebook only opened membership to non-college or high school students in Sept 2006 in fact - so if we had wanted to jump ship because of the 'stalker feed', there were still plenty of other options (e.g. MySpace) and the chance for a disruptor to launch if the other options weren't suitable. In practice, users chose to join Facebook and grow it to what we know it as now.