Except…All Things Digital’s Liz Gannes reports that Google says the whole thing is wrong. It’s not working on Circles and isn’t announcing anything at SxSW. The denial doesn’t quite eliminate all possibility that there’s truth somewhere in RWW’s story–actually, it would be a shocker if Google never introduces anything involving sharing stuff with friends–but it does sound like it’s not unveiling Circles here. Apparently.

But psssst–Circles isn’t a fantasy. In fact, it already launched. More than six years ago. From once-major Google competitor Lycos.

If Google were to launch Circles, it could crib the press release Lycos released at the time and just do a find/replate to swap “Google” in for “Lycos:”

“Lycos Circles gives users a one-stop shop for sharing things, discussing and staying in touch with their favorite circles of people,” said David Kim, CEO of Lycos. “Lycos Circles helps you be more efficient at socializing and staying connected with family, friends and the groups you care about most.”

Lycos Circles features allow users to:

• Easily share topics, discuss, stay in touch and make plans with their favorite circles of people.
• Share whatever they want, with whomever they want, controlling who sees what.
• Share photos, invitations, movie and audio clips, group greeting cards, web sites and more.
• Create polls and predictions.

Lycos is still around, but its version of Circles isn’t. In the world of tech, there are such things as new ideas–but they’re dwarfed by old ideas that keep coming back. (Or, in this case, supposedly aren’t coming back…)

(Thanks to Andrew Curioso.)

Most of the scads of Web services that are dying lately have met their end at an early age, and usually before they’d accomplished much of anything. But over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington has reported that Lycos is shutting down its Tripod site-publishing service (as well as Lycos Mail). That’s like hearing that a celebrity from way back when–one who you weren’t ever sure was still with us–is dying in poverty.

Back in the mid 1990s, Tripod and its archrival, GeoCities, were extremely easy, extremely popular ways to put together extremely basic Web sites for free. (Both paid your way by putting ads on your site.) Here’s what Tripod looked like in 1996, courtesy of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:

During the original Web acquisition frenzy, Tripod was bought by Lycos and GeoCities was bought by Yahoo…and over the years, bot were rendered largely superfluous by blogs, social networks, services like Yahoo Groups, and other methods of getting on the Web without a lot of work. I guess that the fact that Tripod is still extant means that there are folks who still find it useful–and those people will apparently have to find new homes for their homepages.

I was never a Tripod user and hadn’t given it a millisecond of thought in eons, but it’s still kind of sad to see it go. Another Web page builder from back in the day, AOL’s Hometown, died a few months ago. GeoCities lives on, though. And I’m not sure what’s happening to Tripod’s longtime sister service Angelfire, which I was even more startled to find was still in business.