The AM Forum

This site has been a little sluggish in loading the past few days.  This morning after I clicked on the bookmark, I happened to notice the little pop-up bar at the bottom left of the page that appears while a page is loading, read "waiting for Google Plus One", then after a few seconds the page loaded normally. I opened a new tab and tested another bookmark, and the page loaded instantly without this happening.

What does Google Plus One have to do with AMfone?  I did not open the page via a Google search and I don't have a personal Google account, nor do I use G-mail.  The only thing I ever use Google for is the search engine, which I click on anonymously without logging in to anything. From what I have read on the subject, some websites now have "+ 1" button on their page so that Google users could click to signal that they "liked" a particular page , but I haven't seen it on this one, and I'm still not sure what purpose that is supposed to serve in any case.

Since TV viewing and newspaper sales are declining and internet useage increases, advertisers are flocking to the internet.  Also you have streaming video/audio programs on demand.  All this is slowing the ad servers that place ads in webpages and other things, causing them to load slowly.  It is so bad that my machine times out quite regularly. 

I am using Windows and before anyone says, oh yea windows and start the critical remarks, it happens on my android tablet as well.  I can even tell you about when the west coast comes on line after school and again after work.  To keep semi-free internet and sites like this, it is something we will have to endure.  If we want it free of that, then the owner needs a lot more donations to pay for the connection and machines this site utilizes.

In the lower left pane I see ads for searches I have done recently.  So when the site sees your address, it tells google's (and other) ad servers so they give you an ad for what you have been looking at recently this slows thing down a bit and sometimes quite a bit.  Another wonderful thing MS and Google have given us.  And this is only the surface of what google does.  I noticed my android machine downloaded an application for G+1 and I have it set to not download without my approval.  I received an upgrade to my OS and it was embedded.  I don't have a clue what it does and, frankly, am a bit angry at these companies putting crap on my machines I don't want.

Google +1 has been on this site for many months. It has nothing to do with any change in performance.

What purpose or benefit does it serve?

It's Google's version of Facebook.
http://www.google.com/intl/en-US/+1/button/index.html#utm_source=plusone&utm_medium=bubble&utm_campaign=tooltip

More visibility for the site.

Don,

If it bothers you, you can evade it using Ghostery (for FireFox) or similar anti-add/tracking software.

I've never had a problem with it (the Google+1) but as a rule, I attempt to stymy any tracking of my online experience.

As those things go, the +1 is harmless.

There is no tracking. You need to have a Google account and them click on the link to go to the Google +1 site.

Not fearful of black helicopters hovering overhead; my only concern was that it appeared to slow down the web page loading process.  I would get the message in the lower left-hand pop-up bar "waiting for Google plus one" during the delay while the page was loading.  I assumed that the page would have loaded more quickly if it didn't have to wait for G+1 to load.