The social bookmarking service Delicious, now owned by YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s AVOS, this week relaunched with some new features — and according to its existing users, too few of the old ones. And they seem to have pretty good cause for complaint.

Though Delicious’s six years being owned by Yahoo had resulted in little change and much neglect, loyal users saw the new Delicious team’s additions of playlist-like “Stacks” as no compensation for the removal of core RSS feed, browser extensions and tagging features. They spewed their anger in comment threads (like ours), on Twitter, on Facebook, in blog posts and on Delicious.

You can fault the new Delicious team for rushing their launch and underestimating their users’ expectations, but at least they’ve spent the week responding across those mediums; they also added a new “beta status” blog and help account on Twitter. On Twitter alone, the team has sent hundreds of tweet responses to user complaints.

Asked to explain what the AVOS team was thinking, and whether they regretted the way it was done, spokesman Mike Manning replied, “We’ve been focused on making the transition from Yahoo happen as fast as possible. Because of this, we needed to reduce some functionality in the short term and introduce a basic set of new features to get the site out the door. From our standpoint, it’s a competitive market and we’re going to err on the side of speed versus perfection to hopefully build a larger, more compelling experience. We’ll always be listening to the community and will literally be updating the product on a daily basis.”

Now that the migration is complete, the new Delicious team is adding back key features and quashing bugs, Manning said. User tags have been restored, the various extensions have now been fixed, and unmigrated user data is filtering in. But there’s still plenty of stuff missing (for instance, posting links to Twitter and changing network privacy settings; see here), and many users who feel betrayed and say they’ve already switched to alternatives like Pinboard and Diigo.

I reached out to some of the users who had commented here about their dismay over the redesign, and asked whether they were satisfied with Delicious’s post-launch response. While it’s not a representative sample, those who replied said it was a matter of a certain favorite feature or two being restored, and they’re likely to continue using Delicious now that the features are coming back.

But at the same time, Delicious’s Manning said previous users are not the only ones on the company’s mind. “We chose to simplify the experience and refocus on making Delicious a mainstream destination to discover content,” he said.

“Mainstream” is obviously the key word there. Delicious had five million registered users as of 2008, when founder Joshua Schachter left Yahoo. (Schachter, by the way, is also cranky about the changes.) While the user numbers have always been relatively small, this week’s outcry makes it clear that those people got value from the service. It’s yet to be seen whether the new “stacks” would ever inspire this kind of devotion.

After Delicious was bought, Schachter worked at Yahoo and Google and made a bunch of angel investments, but now he’s finally back to working on an independent product: Jig.

Schachter describes Jig as a marketplace for social transactions. The first version of Jig is a Web site about needs: Someone posts a request, other people make suggestions, and the original asker notifies everyone when he or she feels a solution has been found.

An underlying goal of Jig’s approach is to more efficiently allocate users’ attention, Schachter said in an interview with AllThingsD on Friday. He said he feels that other social Web services focus too much attention on popular people and topics — rather than more precise, meaningful and useful connections between people.

Jig comes out of Tasty Labs, a start-up Schachter co-founded with Nick Nguyen (formerly at Delicious and Mozilla) and Paul Rademacher (formerly at Google, and creator of the seminal HousingMaps Google Maps-Craigslist mashup) with funding from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Here’s a lightly edited write-up of my chat with Schachter on Friday:

AllThingsD: So congrats on the launch!

Joshua Schachter: We hadn’t actually meant to launch till Monday. We invited the 3,000 people on our list last night, and someone ignored the [instructions that said] don’t blog or post it. Then it made it to the Hacker News, and that was that. Everybody wrote it up at this point, so we got a few thousand sign-ups, so I guess that was our launch.

Many people have put quite a bit more effort and pain into launching.

It was the most pleasant launch I’ve been through yet. The site didn’t go down, and people were less asshats than I expected.

So, backing up, where did the idea for Jig come from?

When I was at Yahoo, I realized Yahoo Answers was sort of a painfully bad product, basically hostage to the form of Q&A itself. If you make it seem more general, you have a lot more opportunity to build a system that’s better for people. So we’re hoping to connect people, whether it’s about information, goods or something else. Needs are the first thing we’re building. Maybe offers will be next.

But Jig does feel like a Q&A site, with people posting requests and other people responding.

Yes and no. A lot of these sites take away your identity, take away your answers. The Web has been more about information — consuming and producing content — but we’re sort of about who are the people involved, what’s been done already. We’re trying to figure out a low-cost, efficient way trying to get social transactions to the place they’re trying to be.

What’s your stance on real names?

I sort of get it now — it’s jarring to see a first name and last name and profile picture next to someone that’s only using a first name and no picture. I think that people with identity in the system will get trusted more. I understand the anxiety about continuity between real people and pseudonyms. I want people to have an identity, but I don’t care which one it is.

How important are communities versus the larger user base?

We’re still figuring that out. We did build something called affiliations, sort of a mix of badges and groups. We’re trying to build a marketplace, and marketplaces are about trust, so if I get a piece of information from someone and that person is in my neighborhood or a friend of a friend, I have a little bit more trust.

Are you building any sort of underlying structure to make existing knowledge useful? Or is each question a blank slate?

That will probably only be something we could do if we had more data. If we can take advantage of fungibility of knowledge, that would be awesome, but it’s not our top priority. Right now we have a bit of a spam problem and UI bugs [that are higher priorities].

Why start with your own Web site, rather than an app or building on someone else’s platform?

The activity of “I need to do something, does anyone know how to do this?” felt right to do on the Web. We will do mobile stuff in the future, because people want to know stuff about places and local things. It’s probably not right for a desktop app.

Do you see a continuous line between Delicious, your other roles, and Jig?

We did a series of prototypes, and our first prototype, which this came out of, was actually about tagging people. People would tag people with the needs that I have, and it’s still there but hard to see. The need was the tag, and now it just got a little bigger and heavier. People keep asking for classifications — maybe we should do that, I don’t know.

I feel like you, of all people, would be thinking about how to use tagging.

I’m very wary of people tagging their own content, because they’ll try to design for the largest possible audience.

Why is Jig better than asking questions on a social network, or on a dedicated Q&A site?

The idea is that we will try and route attention to your need, and then when it’s done, we take it away. The goal is to efficiently spread out attention.

These sites like Google+ have a problem with the rich getting bigger, where Scoble will post and it always bubbles up to the top. That’s the long tail enforcing the long tail.

We want to get needs in front of the person most likely to resolve them. We’re couching it in the language of a social network, but underneath it’s not an activity stream, because we actually found that doesn’t work well at all.

Latest example: ChallengePost, a two-year-old start-up that helps companies and non-profits run “challenges” that use the Web to crowdsource everything from cool app ideas to slogans that promote absentee voting.

The New York company has raised a $4.1 million Series A round from a group of investors led by Bob Borchers, a former Apple executive who’s now at Opus Capital, along with names like BetaWorks, Delicious’s Joshua Schachter, Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis and Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs.

The new money, which came after $600,000 in angel funding, is being used to expand the company from a two-man operation to one that employs 14 people.

The idea is to expand the company’s client base — to date, its most visible clients have been the federal government (including Michelle Obama, who used it to run an “Apps for Healthy Kids” challenge) and New York City (which has used the company to run a Gotham-specific apps contest.  So far the challenges they’ve hosted have offered more than $40 million in prize money.

Founder Brandon Kessler says he also wants to expand the company into “problem identification,” where Web users can suggest challenges that ought to be sponsored. There shouldn’t be a shortage.

The service seems remarkably similar to 4chan, the rowdy image-sharing message board, but rather than anonymity, Canvas requires that users have accounts (would-be users currently sign up through Facebook Connect), and unlike 4chan, Canvas keeps an archive of posted graphics (and will reportedly later support other media).

Poole has described his goal with Canvas as trying “to reimagine what an image board should be today using the current technologies available.” Canvas and 4chan are run separately.

Unlike the many personal and professional image-sharing sites that already exist, Canvas seems oriented toward PhotoShop jobs, cartoons and memes (more like Cheezburger, which often riffs off 4chan-originated concepts, and just raised $30 million for an Internet comedy empire). Canvas is backed by Ron Conway, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Kenneth Lerer and Joshua Schachter.

Image via TechCrunch.

Beyond the directory-style LinkedIn, that could mean facilitating professional profiles on social sites, pushing job postings through networks, introducing contacts, soliciting referrals and sharing resources.

Part of the reason this idea has been so resonant with Web entrepreneurs–and investors too–is the trouble they’re having with hiring qualified people to work at their own companies.

(Unlike in other parts of the world right now, unemployment rates are not as much of a problem among techies.)

Assetmap, a pre-launch San Francisco-based start-up, for example, wants to help companies and nonprofits understand what assets they may have at their disposal through their networks.

These connections already exist, but they’re often unexploited, according to Assetmap co-founder Nathaniel Whittemore, who let me in on a bit of what he’s doing.

Whittemore told NetworkEffect the failings of sites like LinkedIn include “forcing a distinction between personal and professional that is becoming less and less obvious and failing to recognize that the one-to-one friend-based social graph isn’t the only graph that has value for business.”

Whittemore and co-founder Danny Moldovan hail from the world of social entrepreneurship. Former Northwestern classmates, they had both been at the fast-growing activism platform Change.org.

They have teamed with Jayson Vantuyl, co-founder of Engine Yard, the Ruby on Rails hosting service. At the moment, they are funded by friends and family while looking for outside capital, and plan to launch this spring.

There are many early companies in this space with fancier pedigrees.

Top Prospect, a social recruiting site that rewards users with $10,000 or more for helping friends find jobs, was funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Ron Conway, David Goldberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Rick Thompson, Chamath Palihapitiya and other angels.

Also based in San Francisco, Top Prospect was founded by Rotem Perelmuter, who formerly sold an online radio service to MTV Networks during the dot-com boom (and more recently ran a hedge fund). The site is currently in open beta.

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter’s Tasty Labs, which has gotten money from Union Square Ventures, hasn’t said much about what it is doing, but is also working on something similar to the idea of an asset map.

Elsewhere, BranchOut, which bills itself as offering “your professional profile on Facebook,” raised $6 million from Accel Partners, Floodgate, Norwest Venture Partners and many angels.

And Hashable, a network for introductions, raised $4 million, also from Union Square Ventures.

And Namesake, from Ad.ly and Newroo co-founders Brian Norgard and Daniel Gould, offers a pretty site for “opportunity routing,” with features such as a real-time stream and chat.

It goes on–other young start-ups in the space include Sumazi, Pursuit, Identified and Gild. (You knew this would happen: Gild turns the social recruiting concept into an online game.)

It wouldn’t really make sense to combine social and professional networks by starting from scratch, so these sites are built on top of existing networks like LinkedIn and particularly Facebook. If you want to try them out, be prepared to cough up those Facebook Connect credentials a whole bunch of times.

(Cute explainer graphics above from Assetmap, Top Prospect and Identified, respectively.)

Etacts, which participated in the Y Combinator program earlier this year, offered a free Web app and plug-ins that helped Gmail and IMAP users manage their email relationships by showing information about their contacts’ social Web activity and communication history.

The start-up, co-founded by recent Duke grads Howie Liu and Evan Beard, had raised $650,000 in funding from Ron Conway of SV Angels, Eric Hahn of Inventures Group, Jim Young from Hot or Not, Lorenzo Thione and Barney Pell from Powerset, Joshua Schachter from Delicious, and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. And I believe Ashton Kutcher was involved as well.

Etacts will no longer accept user sign-ups as of today and will delete all user data effective January 31, it said in an email sent to users.

Etacts’s product was quite similar to that of another Y Combinator company, Rapportive. Salesforce also just bought another YC company this month, Heroku, for $212 million in cash.