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.
(All Stylish styles are available as greasemonkey scripts.)
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”
At the very least, they should be limiting it to only people on your contact lists. I couldn't care less how many random Google users liked the same thing I did. If, on the other hand, I could see that people I know liked it, maybe I would want to discuss it with them.
In some sense, I feel like these new features are a bit lazy on their part. They're sort of avoiding doing anything innovative or novel and instead are just jumping on the social networking bandwagon to give the illusion of progress.
In my opnion they should focus on core functionalities missing (such as feed filters), their social features are way beyond what you can find elsewhere to share content (Friendfeed, Facebook...).
The "like" feature is plain terrible, the smiley face is distracting me from the content of the feed because it's on top and bright yellow. It was an awful idea to put it there.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.
About four months ago traded out my normal GR for an instance of it in Prism with the Helvetireader style sheet, and have never looked back.
Do that, and see how nice and minimalist a web app can be.