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Google recently announced in a YouTube blog post that, starting today, all new accounts created at the popular video sharing site will contextually create a Google account or link the YouTube account to a pre-existing one. The change is part of an effort to encourage users to experiment new Google products, and doesn’t affect users who are already registered at the site.

The search giant has been trying to enhance its social capabilities for a long time, including with the recent introduction of public profiles that can appear in search results for the query corresponding to the user’s full name. To Google, linking YouTube with Google accounts is important in this perspective in that it introduces the vast YouTube user base to services such as iGoogle, GTalk and many others, which in turn benefit its advertising revenues.

Users could already link the two accounts previous to this annoucement, but this was completely up to the user’s choice until now. For existing YouTube users who don’t own or haven’t yet linked to a Google account, the site periodically displays a message prompting them to finalize the account setup.

Google also noted that “some of the new features we roll out down the road may require a Google Account. In these cases, we’ll be there to help you link your YouTube Account to a Google Account if you want to check the features out”. It therefore becomes quite clear that Google has plans for YouTube to become a central part in its overall social scheme and is trying to encourage users to link the two accounts in every way it can.

One of the advantages for Google once users sign up with a Google account would be a significantly better targeting for its advertising both in and outside YouTube (Google Docs, AdSense advertising, Google News and Finance, etc.) thanks to the personal information gathered on the search giant’s servers. This is particularly important in light of the recent introduction of behavioral targeting for AdSense, which keeps track of the user’s interests to try and display to him or her messages that are most likely to attract his or her attention.

Like many other popular search engines, Google collects search data for its users for the previous 9 months in order to achieve better targeting, with governments — particularly the EU court — pushing for such a limit to be reduced to 6 months or less. However, there is no restriction for the gathering of non-search related data including YouTube and Gmail among others. Privacy watchdogs have repeatedly criticized the search giant’s approach towards private data retention and the restrictive terms of service it applies to most of its web products, but to no avail so far.

Users can still sign up for YouTube with any email address, and they will still be able to pick a unique username. “So why are we doing this?,” YouTube’s James Philips wrote on the company’s official blog. “We feel that by jointly connecting accounts, you can take greater advantage of our services both on YouTube and on Google, especially as we start to roll out new features in the future that will be powered by Google technology,” he concluded.