In many ways, YouTube has always been a social network. The tricky part is that most folks who use the site do so in order to watch videos, rather than socialize.
Google tried to establish a social networking site several times in the past to complete with the almighty Facebook. But even the company’s latest endeavor in the social space, Google Plus, did not work out as planned. If you consider that Google went all in that time, forcefully integrating Google Plus in many of the company services, and pushing it on its prime properties such as Google Search, it is not far-off to call Google Plus a failure.