Don’t forget that they ran logins and notifications for everything through the Google+ interface and did things to juice the numbers like uncontrollable push notifications every time someone you’d ever exchanged email with joined (hi random person who bought a bookcase on Craigslist!).

The G+ numbers looked suspicious if you ran any sort of public website, where e.g. I saw metrics for referrals or shares at least an order of magnitude lower than Facebook or Twitter.