Verizon Wireless experienced another outage on its LTE network on Wednesday, causing customers across the country to lose access to their ultra-fast mobile broadband connections and deal with the slower data speeds of Verizon’s 3G network. Verizon restored the network to normal late Wednesday, but this latest glitch shows Verizon’s one-year-old 4G rollout is still experiencing some growing pains. As the first to launch LTE on a large scale, Verizon has become a guinea pig for the entire industry, making it the first operator to encounter and deal with the bugs remaining in the new technology.

Unlike the major outage Verizon experienced in April, Wednesday’s LTE problems didn’t affect all customers and it affected them intermittently. April’s outage affected all high-speed data connections to 4G customers; new HTC Thunderbolt and MiFi owners couldn’t even get a 3G connection and had to resort to the dial-up-modem-like speeds of Verizon’s 2G network.

This time around, customers affected couldn’t link up with the LTE network, and while there were reports of some customers losing their 3G access as well, most devices were able to fall back on Verizon’s 3G EV-DO network. EV-DO doesn’t pack the punch of LTE, but is enough to support most of what you would want to do on a smartphone. Verizon issued this statement on Thursday morning:

“Verizon Wireless 4GLTE service returned to normal Wednesday evening after the company’s network operations team resolved a technical issue.  Some 4G customers had reported intermittent or unavailable 4G service, or devices operating on 3G, for periods of time starting late Tuesday. Throughout this time, all customers were able to make voice calls, send and receive text messages, and 3G data devices operated normally.”

In April’s outage, a software glitch originating deep within Verizon’s network core began knocking down elements of Verizon’s new LTE service delivery architecture, taking down the servers that identified individual customers as they moved through the network. That kicked all of Verizon’s 4G customers off both Verizon’s data networks. CDMA-only customers weren’t affected, because Verizon manages them on its older CDMA service delivery systems. This time, the problem doesn’t appear to have originated in the core, but rather in the radio network itself, otherwise, 3G data would have been knocked out as well. Or Verizon may have learned its lesson from that last outage and figured out a way to shunt 4G customers over to the 3G core, where their devices would behave like ordinary CDMA phones.

When Verizon built its new LTE network, it didn’t just mount new fatter radios on its towers; it changed the fundamental design of every aspect of its network: moving from hardware to software driven base stations, evolving its network service delivery systems from old hierarchical voice-centric chains of gateways to new flat IP architectures, and replacing old copper backhaul links with fiber Ethernet to the tower. It was also the first operator to do such a complete overhaul on such a huge scale. For many of the vendors in its network, Verizon’s early 4G launch marked the first time their new LTE equipment was deployed commercially. I’m actually surprised more bugs haven’t reared their ugly heads in the year the LTE network has been online.

Still, Verizon’s customers probably won’t cut the carrier too much slack. Verizon, after all, bills itself as having the country’s “most reliable network.” In April, the repercussions from the nationwide outage weren’t too bad, probably because Verizon only had a few hundred thousand LTE customers at that point. Today, it has several million. What happens when an outage occurs and it has tens of millions of 4G customers?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• LTE-Advanced: what it is and isn’t
• Sprint’s tightrope walk: finding a balance for its network modernization plan

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Flash analysis: the future of Yahoo

The company had previously raised $1.5 million from Accel Partners, and a half a dozen angels including Marc Andreessen; Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn; Rob Solomon from Technology Crossover Ventures and the former CEO of Sidestep; as well as Brad Horowitz, who is VP of products at Google.

Tiny Speck’s first offering is Glitch, a browser-based massively multiplayer game. When I spoke to Stewart earlier today he said that the company will use the money to expand its operations both in Vancouver and in San Francisco, where he hopes to establish an engineering beachhead. Stewart visualized Canada as the center for company’s creative productions. Tiny Speck, which currently employs eight (along with a dozen contractors) already has quite a few open positions. Stewart said those numbers are going to swell. He hopes to launch the beta version of Glitch in December 2010.

In an interview, Stewart told our own Mathew Ingram that the company would develop ” companion applications for mobile — so iPhone and Android — that give you a more limited amount of gameplay but allow you to kind of interact with the game without having the whole client open.”

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Tiny Speck