Google has started to roll out the ability to connect your YouTube account with Google+ in order to discover videos that your friends are sharing on the social network on the YouTube home page.

The feature was revealed in a Google+ post by Nirav Mehta, a product manager at Google. You can connect your YouTube account to Google+ from your settings page on the video-sharing service, but Mehta says that it will take a little while before the videos show up on the YouTube home page. While the functionality of this link between your accounts is initially basic, I would imagine that deeper YouTube/Google+ integration and new features will be rolled out in the future.

This appears to be another step in Google’s plan to unite all of its properties under Google+ and make its entire suite of services much more social. The search giant added a feature that lets you start a hangout directly from YouTube in August, while it added easier Google+ sharing to Google Maps last month. You can also collaborate with other Google+ users on a Google Docs file in a hangout.

Meanwhile, when I was watching some YouTube videos on Thursday, I noticed something interesting about the way in which the video-sharing service now displays related content once a video has ended. Instead of showing one featured video prominently with a few other related videos, a grid of 12 videos is displayed.

The Like and Dislike buttons now appear at the top of the video, along with the replay and share buttons. Perhaps this new-look way of displaying related content is being rolled out to encourage you to watch more videos by offering you a wider choice of content to explore.