I hate to single you out, but the amount of blatantly unresearched, inaccurate statements in this discussion is really disappointing. This is a powerful, well-implemented (easy to opt-in/opt-out of any broadcasting on an app by app basis) feature.
This is no longer a great user experience and it's not longer a social network... No, this is without a doubt a media venture that will do anything to make their advertisers happy... at the expense of the users.
I wonder if you see your own contradiction? You had to go out of your way to make a point that users need to now attend the settings for every single product they use and maintain additional information. It seems that with every year things get more and more out of hand
Today, as an FB user I'm not happy. For one, I had to download a plug in for the new ticker (a news feed with in a news feed?) just to get rid of the annoyance. Tomorrow we will have to deal with a dozen more ticks.