Google chairman Eric Schmidt commented this week that Google+ will not be able to beat Facebook at Facebook’s own game – so Google is trying to “find a new problem and do that much better” than Facebook.

But so far, it seems that Google+ is playing a similar game as Facebook, with undeniable similarities in its structure and layout and perhaps even its early strategy, “tracing a path similar to Facebook’s initial growth — building excitement in a core group of early adopters,” according to Michael Nardis, head of the research organization YouGov. Google’s tactic was to implement an initial invite-only phase, creating an exclusivity that helped build hype, though this also meant that invitees often found a social network that had few people to socialize with.

Still, after around three months of operation, Google+ boasts 50 million users. It does have unique features to tout above Facebook, such as “Circles” instead of a friends list and “Hangouts” for group video chat, something that other services such as Skype charge for. And Google+ is continuing to move forward; it opened to the public on September 20 and has introduced circle sharing to help ameliorate the problem for Facebook users of rebuilding a contacts list.