Especially since it's global across Google Reader. I couldn't care less that some random person in Florida that uses reader liked an article that ended up in my rss feed. I wish I could turn it off.
You can turn it off. I spend a lot of time in Google Reader, so efficiency and lack of distractions is very important to me. I turn off widgets that I don't use in most of the sites that I frequent.
The way you can turn it off it to install the Stylish extension for Firefox (which allows user specified style sheets on a per-site basis), use Firebug to find the div id or class of the widget you don't like, and set it to "display: none !important".
Stylish is similar to greasemonkey, which means that you can usually find someone who's already done what you're looking for, and shared it. Here is my stylesheet to make Google reader minimalistic: http://userstyles.org/styles/12663 and here is what it looks like when installed: http://bit.ly/minimalreader You can temporarily disable it with a single click when you want to use any of the hidden widgets.
Thanks but that only works on Firefox and I generally prefer to use Chrome since it's so much faster. (The difference is even more striking in Linux than it is in Windows.)
While you can hide the number of likes using other scripts, I did want to see the number. So I moved it to the most logical place. Right next to the “Like link”
