MixBit currently only hosts a placeholder site, which reads:

“YouTube is shutting down. Instead of sitting around, we thought you’d want a new site to not only watch cat videos, but create them… together!”

The site further promises that the “future of video is launching soon.” The Verge, which spotted Hurley’s tweet about MixBit first, also found a (now-disabled) test pages including one featuring a “looping mp4 video featuring YouTube co-founders Hurley and Steve Chen.”

MixBit is being developed by Avos, the startup co-founded by Hurley and Chen that also bought Delicious.com in 2011. Recently, GigaOM spotted a still-unannounced Delicious offspring called D.me built by Avos.

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Not only does it feature some famous faces (Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Niklas Zennstrom, Chad Hurley and many more) but it also actually made me chuckle.

Basic premise: a panel of kids is hiring for CodeClub. And guess who turns up to the interview…

I could have done without Prince Andrew’s appearance (here’s why) but still.

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The Next Web, Amsterdam, April 26-27
Speakers include YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia, and controversial gamification expert Gabe Zichermann.

Deutsche Gamestage, Berlin, April 24-28
This five day event focused on the games industry incorporates a developer conference and awards ceremony that make it the German equivalent of GDC.

Data Science Global Hackathon, worldwide, April 28-29
Timed to coincide with Big Data Week, this series of global hackathons is organized by Data Science London, takes place at local events in places like Helsinki, and offers hackers a chance to compete against other teams around the planet: participants will be presented with a serious data set and asked to do something exciting with it. More here.

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From missing accounts to broken APIs to tagging features that had been killed in the migration, their angst erupted everywhere possible — on Twitter, Facebook and on the web. In a post shortly after the launch, I cataloged some of the issues and pointed out where, perhaps, it had gone wrong: maybe the new team misunderstood the way existing users relied on Delicious… maybe they treated the products as if it was new when it was, in fact, a relaunch.

That post itself became another beacon for complaints, with dozens of users piling in to detail their continuing frustrations. Delicious reached out to me briefly to point out that it was working on fixes, and the thread even prompted the appearance of new co-owner Steve Chen, who left a series of comments for users and asked everyone to give the team another month.

I imagine this has been an incredibly stressful time for all of them — anybody who’s ever launched a product knows how terrifying it is to go public and then receive the inevitable barrage of complaints, but nobody expects a full-scale revolt.

Still, they appear to be trying hard. The pressure is intense, not least since rival services such as Pinterest, which just raised $27 million, appear to be pushing hard into territory that AVOS obviously wants to but can’t start to reach until it’s fixed the problems.

While that self-imposed deadline is not up yet, but I thought it was still worth noting the moves that have been made in the two weeks since. So, halfway to its new target date, how is Delicious doing?

Public progress

Well, the team has clearly been coding furiously. Some features that were missing on launch have been resurrected, including tag bundles, and the broken plugins for browsers like Chrome and Firefox have been replaced.

In addition, the company has been pumping information out to try and communicate what they’re doing: writing a series of blog posts updating users on progress, introducing a new forum for users to get information, and really trying to get out the message that this is a work in progress.

The revolt seems to have quietened down somewhat, although it’s hard to tell if that’s because users are happier — or have just left. Most of the (admittedly anecdotal) evidence I’ve heard suggests the latter.

And right now at least one area of the old Delicious remains untouched, however: the site’s social features. While they were never particularly strong — something that was a real shame — one of the mainstays of the old service was the “network” page. That was where users could drop by and see the links that their friends and contacts had recently saved. For me it was Delicious. It was where all the discovery, curation and sharing took place.

Under relaunch, the network page died… and not just quietly expired but a sort of ostentatiously messed up, rub-your-nose-in-it dead: in fact, rather than the old “network” page has been replaced with the page of a user called Network… no redirects, no pointers, nothing. This means that a huge amount of links and bookmarks will be dead, and a large quantity of Googlejuice may have been squandered, as well as the disappearance of an item of high value to users.

So, as progress reports go, it’s still mixed. Two weeks in, have things improved for you?

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But when the site relaunched yesterday, I noticed there were a few problems — a few elements that didn’t seem to work for me, or felt strange — and my old account had been deleted because I hadn’t gone through the transfer process.

What I didn’t expect was a high volume of comments pointing out that this was just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, the response in this comment thread was unanimous: This relaunch appears to be broken.

Here’s one commenter, Suman, explaining what went wrong:

I had a fairly bad experience with the new Delicious today. Just last week I had spent a few hours curating my saved bookmarks and organizing tags. The new Delicious doesn’t seem to know anything about it. All my effort is lost. There is no longer a bulk-edit function to redo my changes. I can no longer manage my tags – could find no option for deleting old tags. Some of my tags with special characters are now broken, I get a 404 when I try to access them. I am done. Goodbye Delicious.

Meanwhile, many seemed to have the same problem as Mindctrl, who said the transfer of accounts from the old Delicious to the new Delicious was proving problematic: “My account is gone, despite me going through the transfer process. I’ve emailed them and am awaiting a reply.”

And lots of people were angry about the changes to tagging and tag bundles. Ellen said “I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into sorting out tag bundles with hundreds of tags… but now only a small fraction of my tags remain listed, and the bundles are gone!”, and you could hear the anguish when DSP pointed out “I had over 4 thousand tags, now I have just 40. Please tell me this is only temporary!” And that’s just the start. The full comment thread is packed with people complaining about broken features, missing pages, dead feeds.

It’s not just our commenters, either. Over at ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick said he wanted to like it but couldn’t. And Matt Lingard summed it up by showing the lengthy list of features that are “still in development” (many of which were entirely functional under the old design), stating simply, “if you’re this far from being ready, don’t launch.”

So what happened?

It strikes me that there were three possible reasons for this mess. Perhaps they were separate, perhaps they were linked together, perhaps there are others:

• AVOS didn’t understand how people were using the website

The changes don’t appear to have a major impact on casual users, but how many casual, active users of Delicious were there? The visual chrome is a welcome addition for a site that’s trying to go more mainstream, but it comes at the expense of information: elements now obscured or made invisible include the tagging system (which has always been one of the site’s core strengths) and the network (the basic unit of social currency on the site). Without these, Delicious is of little use to many of the people who had stuck by it over the years.

• AVOS didn’t get how people were using the API

Delicious had a lot of web developers and technologists as users. Many of them used the site’s APIs to pull data in and out, particularly to publish elsewhere — on blogs, news websites. Today, those things are pretty much broken — and, more to the point, there were no signals given beforehand. Nothing has been redirected or pushed elsewhere; no parallel systems seem to have been put in place to give anyone that was hooked up to the API the time — and warning — to change what they were doing. It just broke.

• AVOS didn’t understand they were playing with a live product

This is probably the crucial element. In the web industry, we are all very used to developing sites in beta, testing things out, seeing the data that comes out. That’s the development process. Except Delicious wasn’t a new product; it was an existing one with a small but committed following. Those users who loved Delicious really loved it: they’d stuck around through years when the product was given minimal development or resources. They’ve been rewarded with deleted accounts and other problems, which has made them pretty angry.

Maybe the long-term future for Delicious lies away from that user base; but you can’t move them along simply by flipping the switch. Reworking an existing product is not the same as starting from scratch.

When you’re rebuilding or redesigning, you have a legacy to maintain. Yes, that can be a pain — but what else was AVOS buying if it wasn’t the brand and the user base of the site, and the data that they’ve put into it? It clearly wasn’t the technology, which was the first thing to get thrown out the door. When you rebuild a product, you have to remember that it needs to take into account all those people who rely on the service for all sorts of things. At the very least you give them options to fall back on, rather than simply telling them that all the stuff they’ve been using for years will be in the product again… just not yet.

My colleague Mathew Ingram thinks that the only way Delicious can prove it’s really useful in the long term is if the owners can pull quality data out of the site. He may be right, but the trouble is that if the new owners alienate everybody who stuck by it during the bad times, they might not even be able to get that far.

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When social-bookmarking pioneer Delicious arrived with a new design and the beginnings of a new service, it wasn’t just a significant moment for the site’s fans and critics. Sure, the purists might not be happy — a number of features seem to have disappeared — and there’s always the chance it could revitalize a brand that has looked unloved for a long time. But it was interesting in broader terms, too.

What makes the return of Delicious really fascinating to me is that it’s the latest sign of a resurgence in activity by some of the people who were the earliest pioneers of the social-web boom, back in the middle of the last decade. Delicious, after all, is a former “Web 2.0″ staple that’s being regenerated thanks to the work of two other prominent Web 2.0 founders: YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

And the relaunch is timed, coincidentally enough, just as another Web 2.0 veteran — Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield — also returns to the fold. Tuesday sees the public launch of Glitch, the cute, massively multiplayer online game he’s been developing for the last 18 months or so — a sort of surreal Mario-meets-World of Warcraft. (Disclosure: my girlfriend works as a contractor on Glitch, and I count a substantial portion of the team members as friends).

It’s not just a return to the front line for Butterfield, but also to Flickr’s roots. The photo-sharing site started off, after all, as the offshoot of a project called Game Never Ending. Watching these two moments is a bit like a flash back to six years ago, when the bright young things of Web 2.0 were starting to assert their influence over the future.

Welcome back, class of 2005

Six years ago, there was a crop of audacious founders who made their names cashing in and setting the Web 2.0 boom into motion. In the space of just a few months, Rupert Murdoch had purchased Myspace, Skype was bought by eBay, and Yahoo had gone on a spending spree that resulted in a dizzying sequence of purchases: Delicious, Flickr, MyBlogLog and more. These were all big bets, not least at Yahoo — which looked as if, for a while at least, it might use those deals to create the core of a new, faster company built around social information.

There’s no doubt that this group of entrepreneurs, whether they sold their businesses for millions or billions, were ahead of the game. Today, the ideas they laid out are writ large across the web: YouTube is even more enormous than it was in the past, trading links has become a real core of online activity, and no site would seriously consider launching without social elements.

But ever since its companies sold, 2005′s graduating class has seen the direction and shape of the web move away from them. Essentially, as Facebook rose, so their influence has faded. And so now we seem them attempting to come back and prove they can do it all over again: There’s Hurley, Chen, Butterfield. There’s Caterina Fake, Flickr’s other co-founder, who is currently hard at work on a new stealth startup called 2bkco (see disclosure). And while Delicious founder Joshua Schachter might not be involved in the new version of the site he created, he’s running another company dedicated to making social software more useful.

Beyond building things they like, what is it they are all trying to do? Do they want to claw back some of that influence, or prove that the ideas they had in the past are still important? It’s hard to say. Certainly, they are all more than simply lucky, because they are clearly talented people. But here’s the thing: the web looks like a very different place today than it did back then.

In reality, the company each of these entrepreneurs probably thought they could build is what we know as Facebook. But the Facebook of today is a radically different kind of service than the one they imagined, and it’s native to a different kind of web than the one inhabited by Delicious or Flickr or any of the others. It’s rapaciously hungry, unashamed to force us to behave in particular ways — and prepared to collect an overwhelming volume of data to get what it wants.

Sometimes it feels as if the early social sites are like internal combustion engines, purring away happily while Facebook powers up like a particle accelerator. And that’s why it’s important for this returning group of entrepreneurs to do more than simply bring the ideas they had in the past back to life.

Silicon Valley is populated with people who got lucky once and cashed out, usually thanks to the largesse of a free-spending major corporation like Google, Microsoft or (now) Facebook. Many simply disappear with their winnings and are never heard of again. Others return with new ideas and new companies. Why? Partly because that’s the only thing they know how to do — and partly because they want to prove that they weren’t just fortunate, they were good. And that’s the challenge facing this latest crop of success stories, too. How they fare remains to be seen.

Disclosure: 2bkco is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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After a wobbly few months, the site was bought by AVOS, a new company formed by YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, who promised “to take on the challenge of building the best information-discovery service on the web.”

Now we get to see exactly what they mean. The new-look Delicious launched overnight.

So what do you get? Let’s take a look.

First up, signing up is easy. Although I was a long-time Delicious user, first joining back in 2005, I stopped using the service last year and defected to Pinboard.in, a great clone aimed at power users. In fact, when AVOS moved to the new Delicious, they actually deleted my original account. So I was able to use the service as if for the first time.

Once inside, there are some obvious visual changes. Everything has a slightly warmer, softer tone; gone are the sharp edges and minimalist presentations that made Delicious look like the work of an engineer.

Popular links are presented in a straightforward list, while groups of links (known as “stacks”) are pushed to users in a glossy format supported by photographs. It’s nice eye candy, but takes up a lot of screen space.

In terms of functionality? Well, it’s tempting to say that the new Delicious is a bit like Pepsi of old: “new look, same great taste”. But it’s probably more accurate to simply point out that the revamp is less than radical.

Most of the obvious changes are essentially updating the slightly dated lexicon of Delicious and bringing it in line with a more modern, social web context. For example, users can now add avatars — something that seems almost idiotically simple, but had never emerged with its previous, spartan approach.

Elsewhere, users now “follow” somebody instead of adding them to their network. And collections of links — which were previously known as bundles — have become “stacks”. These are described as playlists for the web, a signpost that AVOS wants to make Delicious more appealing to mainstream audiences.

In truth, however, none of this is a major departure from what Delicious already did, and it’s certainly not much of a departure from other link collecting or list-making tools such as Bitly.

In a blog post announcing the launch, AVOS admits that most of the work was behind the scenes, rather than in adding new elements to the site.

We realized that in order to keep innovating over the long term, the eight-year-old site needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. The result is a new homepage, interface and back-end architecture designed to make Delicious easier to use.

We’re proud of what we built, but the process has also brought the site “back to beta” as a work in progress.

But in doing so, it’s also managed to break some things that old-time users were used to. A string of my Twitter followers pointed out broken features. For example, existing users complain that their old bundles seem to have disappeared completely; there are lots of reports of problems with browser plug-ins, RSS feeds appear to have stopped working and some of the old pages aren’t working.

Still, these are early days. The product is essentially starting over again, and if users are prepared to accept that this is a beta then there is time — and trust — to rebuild.

Can new users be enticed? Will old users stick around? Even though the new Delicious looks juicier, it’s not clear whether the flavor it had has disappeared or been improved upon. Either way, it looks like the hard work is only just beginning.

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AVOS launched in late April with a headline-grabbing acquisition of social bookmarking pioneer Delicious from Yahoo, but thus far, its exact strategy has been tough to pin down. On its website, AVOS describes itself simply as “an Internet company” that aims to “help solve the problem of information overload.”

In a presentation at GigaOM’s Structure Big Data conference in March, Tap11 Co-founder Braxton Woodham described the startup as an “Omniture of the real-time web” that companies can use to track what’s being said online about their brands in real-time (check out the video below). Tap11′s technology tracks specific topic mentions on Twitter and catalogs the information into searchable archives that companies can analyze. Tap11 has expressed plans to expand to other social platforms, but as evidenced by its sale to AVOS, the company’s technology is pretty impressive as is: With more than 140 million Tweets being posted daily, sifting intelligence from Twitter’s firehose is no small feat.

Together, the capabilities of Tap11 and Delicious could allow AVOS to build an analytical dashboard that companies can use to monitor everything that’s being said about their brands on the web. Understanding public sentiment is the Holy Grail for consumer product companies– Procter & Gamble alone spends $350 million a year on market research– but even the most well-funded firms still conduct the majority of their studies offline with decades-old tools like panels and telephone surveys.

Recent deals such as Salesforce’s purchase of Radian6  and Google’s acquisition of TalkBin indicate the tech industry’s big players have just started to see there’s an opportunity to make a lot of money by helping bring the market research industry into the Internet age. With the Tap11 deal, AVOS may be setting itself up to compete with some pretty heavy hitters.

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Yahoo said today that it isn’t killing its Delicious social-bookmarking service after all, as some suspected it might when it was included on a list of Yahoo assets marked for “sunsetting” late last year. Instead Yahoo is selling the service to Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, two of the co-founders of YouTube. Although the new buyers say they are planning to maintain the service as is, it also sounds like they have something much bigger in mind — and they obviously know a thing or two about building a small service into a major web property. So what could Delicious become? The key to answering that question is information discovery, one of the meatiest problems in media right now.

In a statement about the acquisition, Hurley and Chen’s new company (known as AVOS) hinted at this future by saying that their plan is to “build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information-discovery service on the web.” The company also said that it wants to solve the problem of information overload, which is a problem “not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” according to Chen. Hurley left YouTube last October, and Chen left in 2009.

So how could a bookmark-sharing service — which never really cracked the mainstream web-user market when it was a standalone business run by founder Josh Schachter, and didn’t come any closer to big time adoption after its acquisition by Yahoo in 2005 — solve that problem? The answer lies in how we consume information now, and how that is changing. One of the biggest changes is the social nature of content; how we share it and also discover it via social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, and the increasing amounts of content coming not just from those networks but from apps and services like Instagram.

In many ways, services such as Instapaper and Evernote and Twitter’s favorite feature have taken over the space where Delicious used to be a player: they are all ways of keeping track of those web links and photos and other bits of data that we don’t want to lose as the real-time information stream flows past us at a hundred miles an hour. But they are disconnected from each other — my Instapaper doesn’t know that I favorited something on Twitter, and vice versa. Evernote is close to being a “backup brain” in that sense, but there is still plenty of room to solve that problem of tracking what we have read and shared, and helping us make sense of it. This also arguably something that Google should have — or could have — done using its RSS reader as a foundation, but hasn’t.

And so far, even the existing players have only started to scratch the surface of what they could do in terms of information discovery and smart recommendation, which I have argued in the past is the Holy Grail of media. Instapaper has added features that let you share with others, and see what your friends have shared, and that’s a step in the direction of discovery; so is News.me letting you look over the shoulder of others as they read, and Zite’s explicit recommendations.

But think about the vast amount of content that has already been sucked in by Delicious over the years — arguably the single biggest asset that the company has, and the one Hurley and Chen were likely willing to pay up for. Those millions of shared bookmarks are a kind of social graph of content in a way: they are implicit signals from all the people who shared those links, or stored them for later, that there is valuable content there. Some of those links may be dead or changed, but it’s still a fairly substantial foundation for an information-discovery service to build on.

Search Engine Land says that Hurley and Chen might be trying to take on Google, and in a sense they are: the way we find information is changing, and Google is trying to catch up to those changes too. It’s mostly failing so far. The new kings of social information discovery are Twitter and Facebook — and the Delicious acquisition is a sign that YouTube’s former founders would like to join that race.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user retinafunk

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That Hurley, who founded the online video site with Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in early 2005, would be moving on is not totally unexpected. After all, he hasn’t been a public figurehead for YouTube for quite some time. The bigger surprise is probably that Hurley has held on so long after making a bundle from Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of the online video site in 2006.

Co-founder Steve Chen left his role as CTO of YouTube in late 2008, but remained with Google; apparently Hurley transitioned away from his duties at around the same time.

YouTube is now being led primarily by Kalamangar, who is famously known as Google Employee No. 9. He has been tasked with helping to move YouTube from a very large and popular unprofitable business to one that can use its size and scale to make some serious dough.

Google is shy about sharing too many details on YouTube’s financials, though the site is reportedly serving up more than 2 billion videos a day, and monetizing about 2 billion of those video plays per week. While that means about one in seven videos viewed actually has an ad attached, it’s unclear how long it will be before the site actually starts turning a profit for Google.

Some analysts expected that YouTube could become profitable this year with nearly $1 billion in revenues. Although Google execs have spent the last several earning calls bragging about how the site is monetizing well — and has been for some time — they’ve yet to say that YouTube has actually turned a profit.

The day YouTube actually does start making a profit will be a huge one for the web video industry; despite massive amounts of money being poured into the segment, it has had very few huge success stories to date. A profitable YouTube would not just be a validation for Google and it’s $1.65 billion investment, but for the industry as a whole.

To learn more about what YouTube is up to now, come see Director of Product Management Hunter Walk at NewTeeVee Live on Nov. 10 in San Francisco.

Photo courtesy of Robert Scoble.

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