The growth in the amount of time that Internet users in the U.S. spend on the Google+ website has apparently slowed over recent weeks. During the week ended Aug. 27, users spent an average of 5 minutes, 47 seconds on Google+, which was up around 4 percent from the previous week, according to Experian Hitwise data. The amount of time spent using the Google+ website peaked during the week of July 16, at 5 minutes, 50 seconds.

Visits to the Google+ website by U.S. Internet users fell by 5.5 percent to 1.16 million in the week ended Aug. 27, after rising by 2.6 percent the previous week. By way of comparison, visits to the website rose by 283 percent in the week ended July 16 — 3 weeks after Google+ was launched.

Hitwise revealed that, at the end of July, the number of visits by U.S. Internet users to the Google+ website was 1.79 million and the average time spent on the website was 5 minutes, 15 seconds. This means that the number of people visiting the Google+ website in the U.S. has dropped by around 630,000 from last month, while the average amount of time spent using the service has grown by 32 seconds.

These numbers have to be given a little perspective. While Google opened up access to the service a little more earlier this month, Google+ is still in limited field trial mode and is not fully available to the public. Also, Hitwise’s data does not take into account Google+ usage on mobile devices nor visits to Google+ from the black bar at the top of other Google products. Since Google CEO Larry Page revealed that more than 10 million people had joined Google+ in its first 2 weeks, no official statistics about Google+ have been made public — however, some estimates claimed that Google+ had topped 18 million users by mid-July.

It is not too surprising to me that the average amount of time spent on the Google+ website has risen a little after the service added games a few weeks ago. After all, you are perhaps likely to spend more time on the service playing games in addition to checking out the content that has been shared by your Google+ circles.