"Why should YouTube have an island comment system given that it's a Google property?"
That's a very Google-centric way of looking at it. From their point of view, merging everything may be a big convenience and make them more money through more detailed profiling of users.
But my end user point of view is the opposite. The fact that one company with a product I use bought another company with an unrelated product I use, because it happens to create efficiencies on a balance sheet, doesn't magically create a desire within me to use those products together.
I don't need some stupid cat video I clicked on and watched for 10 seconds affecting my searches and ads I see. My choice of what videos to watch is by default disjoint from my other online activities. If I want to share a video, I'll do it explicitly and don't need any integration to make that happen. Having my actions tracked across unrelated sites and reported to everyone I know, and a labyrinthine scheme of privacy settings I would need to constantly monitor to stay configured the way I want, just keeps me off social networks altogether and using adblock/ghostery everywhere.
That's a very Google-centric way of looking at it. From their point of view, merging everything may be a big convenience and make them more money through more detailed profiling of users.
It's a very every company ever way of looking at it -- if you have multiple systems that do largely the same thing, you take the better or more encompassing of the two (or three, etc) and let it win. This is 90% of the purpose of companies acquiring systems and companies.
As to tracking, do you think Google didn't already track you with complete accuracy and knowledge? I don't think this does anything at all to improve their profiling of you. Literally nothing. They probably have some hopes about engagement, but I would wager the primary motivation is simply rationalizing systems.
And let's be clear -- YouTube's comments before this debacle were a garbage dump of noise. They represented the most notorious, least signal manifestation of comments on the tubes. Now, apparently, distaste for Google+ is enough for people to black that out of their memory?
That's a very Google-centric way of looking at it. From their point of view, merging everything may be a big convenience and make them more money through more detailed profiling of users.
But my end user point of view is the opposite. The fact that one company with a product I use bought another company with an unrelated product I use, because it happens to create efficiencies on a balance sheet, doesn't magically create a desire within me to use those products together.
I don't need some stupid cat video I clicked on and watched for 10 seconds affecting my searches and ads I see. My choice of what videos to watch is by default disjoint from my other online activities. If I want to share a video, I'll do it explicitly and don't need any integration to make that happen. Having my actions tracked across unrelated sites and reported to everyone I know, and a labyrinthine scheme of privacy settings I would need to constantly monitor to stay configured the way I want, just keeps me off social networks altogether and using adblock/ghostery everywhere.