Is there any historical evidence that a meteoric rise in traffic, of this magnitude, has translated into a long term success? I am not making any prediction on Google+'s future; I am just interested if there are examples that I am not able to recall.

Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare had to earn their traffic along the way. The evolutionary process of going from 100K users to 750M users must be an important component in their success.

If these statistics for Google+ are correct, they seem to be leap-frogging the entire process that happens when growing your user base from nothing to something. I cannot decide if this is a benefit or a detriment to the eventual success of the product. I would love to hear examples or counter-examples of this.