Although YouTube isn’t a traditional social network, it is still by far Google’s most popular social networking service. Yep, much more than Google+ and actually not far behind Facebook. Google knows that it must use YouTube’s amazingly global broad reach for more social utilization and for more international audiences.

In the last couple of days, YouTube presented two new features to serve those goals (at least partially): The ability to share many videos from YouTube on a Google+ Hangout and the possibility of enabling automatic captions on videos in Spanish.

Video Playlists On Google+ Hangout

Watching videos with friends while exchanging thoughts and experiences in real life is one of the most enjoyable social activities for many. With a new feature which lately introduced, Google tries to bring this activity into the virtual space as well by integrating its two social services together.

A new YouTube app for Google+ is now making it possible to watch a list of videos (playlist) online with friends on a Google+ Hangout. By using this new app users can discuss about different movie scenes, analyze multiple sport moments, brainstorm about recent gadgets’ presentations and rank music videos.

To begin sharing video playlists with your friends online simply start a Hangout and make sure that everybody have loaded the YouTube app from the “+ Add app” tab. Now, anyone participating in the Hangout can add videos (the app has a video search tool). There’s also an option to save the video playlist for future use and for sharing it with others later on.

Spanish Automatic Captions

With over half of billion people speaking Spanish as a native or second language all over the world, YouTube apparently realizes the huge potential concealed if it will make all those users a little bit more satisfied and happy when watching videos on the site. So, it has now added Spanish as another language for automatic captions alongside English, Japanese and Korean.

When YouTube’s algorithm will identify the Spanish language on a video, a “CC” button will appear on the bottom bar of the video player. After clicking on the button and choosing “Transcribe Audio” (or “Transcribir audio”), Spanish captions will be displayed on the video. On the following interview with Spain’s soccer superstar Andres Iniesta you can operate the Spanish captions: