I've removed the plus one buttons and scripts from my sites too.

As you say, they slow the sites down, and there is no benefit because nobody clicks on them. The general public simply can't be bothered to sign up and create a public profile with their real name and everything, just to like my site. There's no benefit to them to do it, so they don't.

Facebook is different - people have accounts already, and they are usually logged on all the time and it's no big deal for them to click the like button.

I think Facebook is winning this social battle hands down, because their platform is fun - you can either visit with friends, or visit fanpages and chat with people who arn't BFF but share a common interest, or play games, or shop right on a commercial fanpage, or get directly in touch with a business and complain on their wall, or whatever.

You can't do any of that stuff on Google+. It's dull and I can't see my customers migrating any time soon, maybe not till the end of this decade, and then only if Facebook screws up badly.

This post reminded me to take a second look at my sites with the newly added Google + button, and I agree, it isn't worth it so far, especially considering the extra weight on the loading page.

Maybe some time ago I would have left it because Google was a company worth promoting, but since Panda and other Adsense shenanigans, they'll need to earn my enthusiasm back. Now it's just another company.

^^ Yeah. Also, it's a benefit for publishers to have the social marketplace run by someone completely different from the controllers of the search marketplace. That way, if something goes wrong with your search rankings, you can still sell on Facebook, once you master that platform's very different rules.

I'm not anti-google, I like a lot of what they do, but what a nightmare if G controlled both the search and social markets. The chance that you get dinged in both increases sharply and it could wipe you out.

It's in the interests of publishers to make sure this little experiment gets stifled at birth by not promoting it. Inertia on the part of the public and Facebook keeping on it's toes should do the rest.

I also added Google +1 button on my site and performance is little better than ever, you may also try human.txt as we're robots.txt it will also help you provide more search engine visibility and speed up your pages.

Hello jaymarketer and welcome to the forums.

you may also try human.txt

As far as I know, that is a cutsie recruiting effort by Google (see www.google.com/human.txt) - I don't see how it would have any effect on speeding up performance. Can you clarify?