No topic was ever changed - we all know Google is in this game to beat (or at least, take a significant minority share) of Facebook's traffic.
The number of users it gained need not be relevant to this goal - they need to gain the right users, and so far that's just not happening. They've won over the technorati, and puzzlingly enough, the photography community. But how many of your non-tech friends are actually on G+? Much less using it?
> ""How is this a success for Google+?""
For one thing, that wasn't me. But let's say it was. Your claim that traffic jumped by 5x is supposed to imply that this was a success for Google - but it's nothing of the sort. Without breaking into the mainstream, Google has no hope of capturing the type of market share, ever, that they are clearly after.
Google is not in this to build a niche social network for the techno-elite.
> "What's the bar now? Suddenly being #1"
What a ridiculous straw man. Nobody says G+ needs to be #1 overnight. But at least movement in the right direction (i.e., mainstream appeal) is necessary if one is to reasonably claim that G+ is succeeding. That's simply not happening.
> "I was just pointing out that you were playing the same game the newspaper was - asking a crazy question given the nearly five-times increase in traffic over a single month."
The newspaper asked a relevant question. Are we supposed to just blindly swallow any number and interpret it in the default manner? By your logic, Groupon is smashingly successful company with strong growth numbers - but we know it's not playing well into their end-game. Neither is this playing into G+'s desired endgame.