Since it’s acquisition, YouTube has remained a relatively separate property, and the merging of YouTube into Google proper has been very slow… until now.

Many updates and changes are beginning to emerge, and the new integration does a few things:

1. It asks to use your real (Google+) name instead of your old YouTube username and renames all your old videos and comments (channel URLs remains unchanged)
2. It adds Google+ information into your YouTube profile
3. It adds persistent Google+ share and notification buttons in the upper right
4. You can launch any video into a Google+ Hangout directly from the “Share” button underneath each video

By the time this YouTube migration is complete, it may change the social network landscape significantly, considering the overall size of YouTube and the amount of time spent there.