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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy for Nest but sad for myself, given the smoke detector was my Christmas gift last year.

Previously I would look to YouTube as an acquisition done right. But after the kerfuffle around G+ integration, I no longer feel that way.

If I have to sign in with my G+ account to manage my smoke alarm, it's going directly into the rubbish bin.

If Apple had bought Nest, on the other hand, I'd feel very differently.

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Had Apple bought nest, you'd have to log into your icloud account to manage it, via your idevice, with no other management abilities available. Apple is absolutely horrible at playing well with others.

I'm ok with that. My issue with Google isn't Single-Sign-On, it's forcing every product into a social-network mold.

Although I'm a happy user of Facebook and Twitter, I think SV's social obsession has largely been fruitless. Social does not improve most products and can actually harm them.

And now I'm worrying about how "social" is going to be slapped on to my fire alarm.

You missed my point. If apple controlled nest, you'd almost certainly only get notifications if you were using an idevice of some sort. Apple's terrible about working with others to create industry standards; the AppleTV for example would be a lot more useful if it used DLNA for streaming instead of Apple's proprietary format.

I think you're missing his/her point. The problem nostromo has is not proprietary formats but social networks. I think the worry is updates like "John Doe turned the temperature in his house to 75!" (and while that fear is overstated, it's not unreasonable to not want products that can detect the presence of humans in your bedroom connected to social networks).

Google+ doesn't really have to be a social network. There's nothing social about my use of G+, and I use it pretty frequently.

Can't you create a Google Plus account without adding any friends so that it's only used a Single-Sign-On?

You can almost certainly do this... until you annoy them, and they pull some "real name TOS" BS on you and disable your thermostat until you send them a scan of your driver's license.

I like that we all have a wonderful opportunity to bash Google, and you turn this around and bash Apple instead. Tsk tsk...

He asked wistfully what would happen if Apple had bought it. I answered that pretty much all the big players are motherfuckers that want you to do everything in their sandbox. Now, you may consider Apple's motherfuckery to be more acceptable than Google's, but they still engage in serious acts of motherfuckery.

With the exception of using iCloud, this is already how I manage my Nest. So?

Not everybody owns an idevice.

You don't want your G+ friends automatically notified when you burn dinner? Or will it be targeted ads for delivery pizza?

If you decide to go out to eat, your self-driving car will take you to TacoBell. Only TacoBell.

A pizza ad ringing while my dinner is still smoldering would at least make me laugh.

I'd still look at YouTube as an acquisition done right. How long has it taken for Google to introduce something that you don't love re: YouTube? At this point, all Google decisions related to YouTube have to be considered independent of the acquisition.

Well content ID is one thing that was unneeded and harmful. Also this video is not available in your country. So not that long. Circa 2007 maybe?

I was mainly referring to the commenter who said the G+ issues being his first problem with the YouTube acquisition. If that was your first major issue, I'd call the acquisition a success. Also, how much of content ID was YouTube covering it's bases legally with the DCMA? I guess, are there easier ways they could have been compliant while being less irritating to users like yourself? I honestly don't know.

If Apple bought Nest they would have killed the Android app.

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