• TechCrunch, Thursday, May 7, 2009 11:15 AM

"It's pretty obvious that Google is getting ready to fully cast its social net over its web properties," says TechCrunch's MG Siegler, as the search giant has been making several moves in that direction, including making social tweaks to iGoogle, integrating Gmail contacts to be used across Google properties, overhauling and promoting Google Profiles, and perhaps most significantly, says Siegler, pairing YouTube accounts with Google accounts.

As of today, if you sign up for a YouTube account, you automatically get a Google account to go with it. "Without saying what it means by that specifically, I think it's pretty clear that Google has big plans for its hugely popular online video site in its overall social scheme," says Siegler. At first, this means little things like being able to feature YouTube videos on your Google profile, but it probably also means being able to put videos in the upcoming "Updates" area, which is Google's version of the news stream. "This area, which has yet to be unveiled, is very important if Google is to find cohesion in its social plans which have so far been scattered," says Siegler, who thinks video will become a big part of Google's social strategy moving forward.

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