We posted this past July about the epic matchup between Facebook and Google+. It’s a high stakes battle and it may take years to ascertain a winner. With 800 million users, Facebook is off to quite a head start.

But in a recent post in TechCrunch, Google’s Sergey Brin alludes that the company may not intend to “play the game” on a level playing field. Based on Google’s strategy, it’s easy to see how Google+ could soon be as disruptive and paradigm shifting to the social experience as Facebook was 5 years back.

According to TechCrunch,

“Hundreds of millions of people use Google every day, and every time they do that is an opportunity to introduce them to Google+. As Google builds social as the backbone across its products (Google Docs will soon be shareable on Google+), the experience should become more seamless and just a part of the way people use Google’s products.

‘In some ways we have run the company as to let 1,000 flowers bloom, but once they do bloom you want to put together a coherent bouquet,’ says Brin.

Already you can see the impact in the numbers Google shares—more than 40 million registered users, 3.4 billion photos uploaded. But pressed on actual engagement (“Are they actually using it?” asked host John Battelle), Gundotra demurred on providing any more meaningful numbers. Google force 40 million signups, no problem. Or build photo syncing with Google+ into Android and automatically get billions of photos. But the question of how much people are actually using Google+ still hangs over the product.

The battle is heating up. While we are far from naming a winner, it should be a very interesting ride.