Months of speculation continue as to whether Google is planning to launch a stand-alone social network.  Two words have been whizzing around the web – Google Circles – and there have been a couple of false alarms in the past week, including buzz that Google would launch its platform at South by South West (SXSW), the music, film and interactive festival in Austin, Texas.  It didn’t.

At the weekend, O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly tweeted: ‘I’ve seen Google Circles, and it looks awesome.’   This has since been removed with O’Reilly stating it was “It’s not a product, per se, and it’s not a new social network. Just some research-y thinking about how you could better manage social data.”

Little has come from Google which has simply maintained it’s working on products that will be more social.   The Next Web thinks it ‘has deployed ‘smoke and mirrors’, remaining quiet at a time when speculation is rife but is quietly moving all of the necessary parts of its service into place’.  The website points to one of the moves by Google to delete private Google Profiles on 31 July.

The latest word is Goggle will launch its Circles platform on 11 May at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco.   Will Google ever square its social media circle and come up with an innovative, distinctive network, that’s an improvement on Facebook?  It’s still anyone’s guess what will happen.  But the rumours continue.