Remember when Tim O’Reilly tweeted about a Google product named Google Circles? He later stated that “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.” Apparently, Circles is a product; it’s a big part of Google+.

Though it won’t be launching today, it appears that the lauch of Google’s social networking service is imminent. According to The Next Web, Tim O’Reilly tweeted that he has seen it and that it “looks awesome”, though his tweet has since been removed.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

A really smart move, regional networks did add some unnecessary complexity to the privacy settings.