The site offers users to access content sorted by media types (articles, products, videos, music and photos) as well as through a free-form search. All of this can be combined, enabling you filter results to just photos and videos related to a certain subject. There even seems to be an element of personalization, offering users to display “more links like this.”

However, currently, only articles and a very small number of videos are on display, and search doesn’t seem to work at all.

There’s no about section on the site, and nothing that directly connects it to Delicious. However, the AVOS team, which acquired Delicious two years ago, also bought the D.me domain, and in fact briefly used it as a kind of link shortener and email forwarder for Delicious. And a look under the hood reveals that D.me is in fact powered by the Delicious API.

At this point, it’s very unclear what the future holds for D.me. An email inquiry to the AVOS team went unanswered. It’s possible that D.me was just a test for the AVOS platform, which the company describes on its website as a “common technology stack we’re building to underpin shared features across the AVOS product portfolio.”

However, there’s also a chance that AVOS learned a lesson from its botched attempt to reinvent Delicious after it acquired the site. A number of features, including the idea of curated collections of links dubbed “stacks,” were eventually rolled back.

Maybe AVOS decided to leave Delicious alone, and experiment with more innovative ideas for content discovery on a separate site.

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Here are the new capabilities of Greplin/Cue according to the company’s blog:

• Through a single calendar interface, Cue aggregates all the emails, phone numbers and addresses related to an appointment.
• Cue integrates reservations, travel plans and even package delivery into the interface, letting you change or cancel a meal reservation, check into flights, track the arrival of a shipment with a few clicks.
• Cue’s contact list updates as your friends and associates update their info in social media. Displayed alongside each contact’s name are their recent posts on Facebook and Twitter.

The idea is for Cue to aggregate as much related information as possible around any event. Here’s Greplin/Cue’s explanation for the change:

We built Greplin because people are constantly inundated by more and more things that require their attention.  But even with lightning fast search, it was still becoming impossible to keep up with the daily barrage of emails, contacts, calendars, tweets, posts, files and more.

That’s why we decided to build Cue: a service that will make all of that technology work for you, instead of the other way around. Cue is the best way for you to contact the people you care about, get where you’re going, and stay informed. We’ve changed our name to reflect the direction of our new service.

Like Greplin, Cue has a free service allowing you to link Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Yahoo Mail, Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. By referring new customers, Cue users can add additional services like Reddit, Pinboard, Delicious, Tumblr and Google Reader. Cue is also available as a premium paid app, which gives customers automatic access to the referral accounts as well as Evernote, Salesforce, Yammer, and Basecamp.

Young entrepreneurs Daniel Gross and Robby Walker founded Greplin in 2010, the same year it closed a $4.8 million Series A round, which was led by Sequoia Capital but also happened to include Bret Taylor, the now departed CTO of Facebook.

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With this swirl of activity, then, it’s no surprise to hear that Parisian service Pearltrees — slogan “collect, organize, discover” — has just raised another $6 million of funding, led by local conglomerate Groupe Accueil.

The company, which has been running in public since 2009, welcomed the injection of funds as a way to help expand and scale up its system for bookmarking and organizing, which is based around a clustered visual interface.

And it needs that scale. Right now Pearltrees is small and has moderate momentum, building up 350,000 users in the past three years. Pinterest, by comparison, has achieved around registered 10 million in the same sort of time — and one study suggests it is now one of the web’s biggest drivers of traffic.

When I made the comparison between the two services, however, Pearltrees’ marketing chief François Rocaboy objected.

“The two services are really different,” he said, reasoning that Pearltrees bookmarks web pages, is used for organization and operates a Freemium model.

And it’s true, those are all things that Pinterest doesn’t get used for much of these things today. But the reality is that not every company in this space can succeed because they are all competing for the same sorts of attention patterns.

Just before Christmas I wrote about the Italian recommendation service Circleme, and wondered whether it could convince people to keep all of their interests and passions listed in one place. Social curation exists in a complex space for organization and discovery that overlaps with everything from to-do lists to tagging, from bookmarking to recommendations… and, of course, big sharing platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. To say it’s a competitive area is an understatement.

But there’s an extra difficulty, too, for this new breed of social curation services. Getting something out of them requires some significant effort from users, because they have to explicitly engage with the product to get the most out of it. For the most part, the quality of information you can get out of a service like Pearltrees is directly correlated to the amount of effort you put in — a spin on the idea of participation inequality better known as “1 percent rule”.

Creation is very difficult. Curation is hard. Consumption, on the other hand, is relatively easy. That’s why a site like Tumblr can go crazy, because it balances each element of that pyramid perfectly.

And it’s why I can’t help feeling that there is a bubble here, as everyone speculates on an idea in the hope of backing a big winner. The balance just feels out of kilter.

It’s understandable, of course, that this is an enticing market. The tools available now are extremely powerful, and they connect to vast amounts of data that pour out of the Web. Combine that with the fact that the social layer is now pretty mature, and there’s very good reason why the next level of ideas are all about how to make the information better.

But is there really enough appetite to satisfy the supply? Is the one percent enough? Is the ten percent? Are there enough neat freaks and hyper-organized users in the world to support all of these businesses?

Pinterest has reached the scale of millions partly because it understands the attention pyramid — but I’m not sure everyone fighting it out in this arena does.

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It turned out that the basic thrust was simple: just tell Circleme about the things that you like and it can help you find more things to enjoy. Users can find films to watch, bands to listen to, restaurants to eat in and much more.

A simple idea, yes, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that it also sounded very familiar. After all, it seems like everyone and their dog wants to branch out into recommendations right now, whether it’s Foursquare trying to tip you off to places you’d like, TripAdvisor helping you find a hotel, or Yelp trying to corner the local services market.

Oh, and then there’s Delicious, which is reworking itself into a web recommendations service, and hot new apps like Pinterest and Amen. Oh, and then there’s a couple of little sites called Facebook and Google+ that are going head-to-head in their battle to capture social signals.

You get the idea: this is a crowded space.

D’Antonio thinks Circleme is different, however, for a few reasons.

First, he says, it’s big. Rather than coming from a niche, it’s trying to cover lots of ground from the very start. The things you can like are divided into a range of categories — movies, music, places, goods and so on — and there are currently 650,000 individual items in the database, with as many as 12 million waiting in the wings. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum either, pulling in your data from Facebook, Foursquare, Netflix and Goodreads (with more to come). That means most new users won’t have to face a standing start.

Second, he argues, the site isn’t just a database of stuff with recommendations built on top. It’s actually grown out of some strong technology — in particular, a semantic engine called Cascaad, which we wrote about when it launched in 2009. Cascaad makes it easy for the system to connect and rank new items that users add to the site, and Circleme is a reworking of this technology for a broader consumer audience.

Third, he points out, Circleme is well-designed — something that’s really important when you are trying to encourage new users in. He’s right: the service is straightforward to use, intuitive and quite beautiful in places. And while new features being added to the beta all the time — today, for example, the site is adding an “activity board” for users to see what’s happening — the team seems to be working hard to retain a sense of elegance wherever possible.

Of course, there’s design and there’s design. But it’s done well, which can make a big difference: take Path 2, for example, is slowly inveigling it’s way into my life because it’s a pleasure to use — and much simpler than using all of the different individual services out there that it connects me to.

Users seem to be responding, says D’Antonio. The stats are good, and early usage is growing fast — both in terms of the number of users and the amount that they are using the site.

“Of course it is early to make any conclusions on these numbers,” he admits. “But we keep track of these every day, and every time we do a new release we make sure that the numbers look better than the day before. I believe that if we can keep these numbers growing, as we grow our community, we have a good chance to do well in this space.”

But even though Circleme seems to be getting many of these things right, it’s got a big task on its hands: becoming a major player in the recommendation game won’t be easy. In fact, its three strengths could also be its weaknesses.

It’s starting off broad, but many great recommendation services start off (and remain) in a niche that means they can focus on being the best at their individual type of activity: say Last.fm for music. There’s a graveyard full of startups who have tried to go too big too soon, and even those who have succeeded to some degree — such as Hunch, which was bought by eBay recently — have had to radically alter themselves along the way to keep going.

Great interfaces, too, are all well and good — but they don’t solve all problems. Right now Circleme’s got two pinch points: getting data in and then getting it out. To bring data in you can piggyback on other services, or you can enter items individually, or you can download a bookmarklet that lets you like a web page or thing — but experience says it needs more. At the other end, being a great recommendation service means delivering tips to people precisely when they need them most, and that suggests to me that we need to watch carefully to see how it expands into mobile.

And finally, the service’s success will ultimately rest on two things: the accuracy of its technology, and the ability to capture lots of activity and data. Circleme has already got the technology in Cascaad, but it’s making a bet that the act of liking is enough in and of itself. And that’s where competition is at its fiercest because the most successful recommendation platforms are the ones that start out doing something else entirely.

For example: these days, the place I go to find links that I might be interested in is Twitter. Lots of people find Facebook is now their serendipity engine. Convincing people to keep all of their interests and passions in one place is hard — but if you have a way to capture lots of user time and activity, you can start doing things with it.

Could Circleme make a decent stab at taking on this market? It’s certainly got a chance, though it’s going to have to fight hard to rise above its rivals.

Still, somebody has to get recommendations right sometime, don’t they?

If you want to take a look at Circleme’s private beta, there are 500 signups available for GigaOM readers.

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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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The BBC iPlayer first added social sharing last September, initially hooking into Twitter and Facebook at the same time it expanded the number of connected devices it could be found on. But by adding sites like StumbleUpon and Reddit, the BBC shows proves that even in video, Twitter and Facebook aren’t everything.

Online video providers are increasingly seeking new ways to allow viewers to promote the videos they’re watching with friends, in an effort to keep driving up the number of video views. While it’s been incredibly popular for viewers tuning into short-form and user-generated clips, social discovery is also being used by professional content providers as a way to boost traffic.

The addition also comes as sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon have focused on providing video recommendations in addition to text links. The former launched Reddit TV a few years ago to improve viewing videos on the site. And StumbleUpon created a Pandora-like service last year for discovering videos through its service.

The ease with which users can share and see what their friends are watching could be one reason why the iPlayer continues to post record numbers for video requests from its viewers month-after-month. Adding more social distribution outlets — and therefore increasing the number of discovery outlets — could grow its viewership even further.

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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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