The hypothetical wormhole to this absurdly ambitious goal? The wish list.

Wish co-founders Peter Szulczewski and Danny Zhang

The startup is called ContextLogic, and it’s got some of tech’s most smartypants investors behind it, as well as 10 million people already signed up for its wish-list service, called Wish.com.

“We want to be Google AdWords for the retailer,” explained co-founder and CEO Peter Szulczewski, an engineer who previously worked on ad algorithms and search at Google for five years.

Users sign up for Wish to make wish lists. They save, tag and recommend products to each other (and, by default, it’s social-spammy, with automatic posts to your Facebook profile and rewards for inviting friends). Then the company matches participating merchants with potential customers, and sends out discounts for specific products.

So, basically, it’s like personalized coupons.

The target retailer for Wish is an Amazon Marketplace merchant who wants to get more distribution without paying Amazon a significant portion of each transaction. To that end, Wish plans to launch self-serve tools for retailers next month, Szulczewski said. Eventually, it wants to get more closely involved with transactions by offering checkout tools.

The 20-person, San Francisco-based ContextLogic has raised $8 million in funding, led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s Formation 8, with former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Factual’s Gil Elbaz, Sling co-founder Blake Krikorian, Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter, Steve Chen of YouTube and Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures and others participating.

Because the Wish experience is all about tastemaking and discovery, “We’re creating hundreds of Fab.coms in different verticals,” said co-founder Danny Zhang, who previously worked on the Overture team at Yahoo.

Wish users have saved 100 million products, and recommend 100,000 of them per day, according to internal data.

There are many other wish-list products out there; for instance, Amazon and Pinterest. Zhang and Szulczewski say Wish’s advantage is that the wish list is pretty, it’s tightly and smartly integrated with an advertising platform and, most of all, it’s constantly being optimized.

Plus, Wish is especially sticky on mobile. Via iPhone, Android and iPad apps, engagement and sales are double what they are on the Web, the company said.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

If there’s one thing the co-founders of YouTube don’t need, it’s money (Chad Hurley and Steve Chen each made an estimated $300-plus million from selling to Google). But, in the form of their new company, AVOS Systems, they do seem to see the value in plugging into the venture capital system — and back into the Google system in particular — by accepting a Series A investment today from Google Ventures, NEA, Madrone Capital and Innovation Works.

On the VC side, the deal is obviously more about the team than about its current products. AVOS has been working on the challenge of reinvigorating Delicious, which it bought from Yahoo, and now is planning an upcoming digital magazine called Zeen.

AVOS said that Alex Kinnier of NEA, and Gideon Yu — who is now president of the San Francisco 49ers and was formerly at Khosla Ventures, YouTube and Facebook — would be joining its board.

The Spool service is made for commuters, travelers and people with limited mobile data plans. It automatically downloads and syncs content between devices when possible. It’s still in limited beta testing, but Spool co-founder Avichal Garg said to expect broader availability in the next few months.

This isn’t just a storage service. Users can store links for their own private use, and also in the process send them to one or more of their Facebook friends.

While Spool might be most easily compared to services like Readability, Read It Later and Instapaper, Garg made other comparisons.

“We’ve built more network effects than Dropbox or Evernote,” Garg said. He added, “This is like a Path for content. It’s not about broadcasting.”

If users install a Spool plug-in for easier saving and sharing, they can also optionally see Spool buttons scattered throughout popular aggregators like Google Reader, Twitter, Quora and Hacker News.

Garg said he is prepared to fight for users’ rights to keep a personal copy of Web content for their personal use. Spool doesn’t work with content from services like Netflix that require a log-in, for instance, and it limits saved videos to 90 minutes in length.

Plus, the San Francisco-based company’s investors include YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and former YouTube VP Kevin Donahue, and the company is already working with attorney David Kramer, who led YouTube’s copyright defense against Viacom.

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.

Expectations aren’t terrifically high for the new Delicious, given the rareness of tech comeback stories and the fact that Delicious was never really that popular. But we can’t help but watch, given Hurley and Chen’s magic touch at YouTube.

The new Delicious retains a lot of visual elements from the old site, but it tweaks the core user activity to be about creating “stacks” of content. In an interview on Monday, Hurley compared stacks to YouTube playlists, saying he thinks the way to go mainstream is by enabling users to express their interests.

(Click to see a larger version of the fantastic “Dog Costumes That Should Be Illegal” stack pictured at right, and check out more screenshots and a demo video at the bottom of this post.)

Here’s a write-up of my chat with Hurley:

AllThingsD: How does it feel to be starting over again, and with a product many people have expectations for, rather than your own fresh new idea?

Chad Hurley: For the product — and for myself and Steve — we’re both starting over and we’re really excited about it. In Delicious’s case, it’s a great brand that belongs in Silicon Valley. We look forward to providing a great service and hopefully introducing it to a bigger audience. From myself and Steve’s perspective, it feels good to be engaged again on finding a simple solution to a difficult problem, which is discovery.

How is this different from the original Delicious?

It became hard when people were adding all this information, tags and links. We’re applying a new layer of ways for people to explore the information. Relating to YouTube terms, playlists were an underappreciated feature of the site, and we saw an opportunity to introduce that concept in a broader sense against all media.

What of the old Delicious did you make sure to keep the same?

We’re keeping the brand and the logo and the utility — having a bookmarklet and all that will stay intact. We’re trying to add one layer of functionality, initially, to explore the links contributed on a daily basis. For us, this is really just the start. We have a lot more features waiting in the wings. We spent a lot of time rewriting the code, redoing the infrastructure and migrating the site over.

Do you think people have a fundamental desire to make lists and bookmark things?

With YouTube — with the Internet in general — you have information overload. The people who don’t necessarily get credit are the curators. We had the YouTube stars, but I always wanted to start a program called YouTube scouts.

It’s interesting that you’re emphasizing curation in a week when Facebook is pushing a new agenda of automated sharing.

At Facebook, they want as many signals in as possible, and that’s great, but right now it’s really noise. We’re really looking for the signal. It’s great to have passive links to share information, and I’m a fan of what they’re doing. I think people get burned out of actively participating. That’s what we did at YouTube, in a way — a really open viewing and sharing experience, where we never asked users to sign in. At Delicious, we’re trying to do that again here — people can get value without signing in.

Back to the original Delicious, there seem to have been a lot of services over the years from then to now that help you bookmark things and create lists. None of them in particular seem to have been that popular, though Pinterest seems to have been doing well lately. Why do you think the timing is right for you guys to pursue this?

There’s a lot of people working on this problem, a lot of people trying to address the problem of discovery and leveraging curation. We’re trying to create a broad functionality and audience. Some of these services are great, but they end up being restrictive. We want to celebrate diversity and we want a global audience with many different interests. This is just the initial stack we’re introducing on top of Delicious, and there will be many more features.

What are your plans to spread and grow the new Delicious, especially based on your experience of encouraging virality at YouTube?

I think actions speak louder than words. We want the product to hopefully grow on its own. We’ll do some traditional forms of marketing, but I feel if we have a compelling product that adds value, we’ll hopefully make it increasingly more attractive for people to spend their time with us.

The new Delicious sounds a lot like the old Delicious brought up to date. The upcoming design is reportedly aimed at solving “the information discovery problem” and will feature “stacks,” a.k.a. topical collections of content, as well as personalization features.

Chen and Hurley said that part of the charm of the endeavor lies in trying to revive one of the pioneering services of the social Web — though they weren’t necessarily big Delicious users the first time around.

Delicious is being rebuilt by a team of 15 in San Mateo, Calif., and is due to relaunch later this year. Chen and Hurley also bought social media analytics company Tap11 to incorporate into Delicious.

This year’s commemoration is more muted. Basically, just a blog post that notes that the site is really, really big.

How big, you ask?

• YouTube users are now uploading 48 hours of video a minute. That’s up 37 percent in the last six months, and 100 percent in the last year. YouTube says the increase comes in part because it’s easier than ever to upload stuff, and in part because YouTube has started embracing lengthy live streaming sessions.
• YouTube users are now watching more than 3 billion videos a day. That’s up 50 percent from the last year, which is also a huge leap, though the growth rate has declined a bit: Last year, views doubled from a billion a day to two billion in six months.

But if you really want context for YouTube’s growth, go back and check out what it was doing in its first year: In December 2005–when Lazy Sunday first hit, and the site had become a mainstream success–viewers were watching 2.5 million videos a month.

And since we’re going back in time, here are three historically important YouTube videos:

Here’s the first clip ever uploaded to the site, back in April 2005, from little-known co-founder Jared Karim:

And here’s the clip uploaded by Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in October 2006, announcing that they’d sold the site to Google:

And here’s Tillman the dog, a 2007 video that showed up in Apple’s early iPhone commercials, and ended up becoming shorthand for the site’s user generated content.

Though the measurement techniques for these kinds of syndicated Web tools are in flux, the McLean, Va.-based Clearspring has more than one billion monthly unique visitors, which it says beats competitors such as ShareThis and Meebo.

Clearspring co-founder and CEO Hooman Radfar said his company opened this year with its first profitable quarter, and that it will bring in tens of millions in revenue annually, “tripling this year and accelerating.” Radfar attested that he doesn’t need the new funding to operate, but rather plans to spend it on acquisitions.

What does he want to buy? Start-ups that “leverage data and build audiences more efficiently,” Radfar said. “We’re trying to look at companies that are younger and earlier than us but don’t have millions to build the real-time infrastructure we’ve built.”

Radfar said that beyond its current advertising business, Clearspring is poised to take advantage of all the data about users and content that passes through its system. “Data is the most valuable outcome of the social web,” he said.

Interestingly, Radfar observed that Chad Hurley and Steve Chen’s new company AVOS, which bought Delicious and a social media marketing company, sounds like it’s heading down a similar path of analyzing real-time audience data.

Their first move is not an obvious one: they are buying the neglected remains of the Delicious social bookmarking site from Yahoo for an undisclosed amount.

AVOS promises that Delicious users can continue to use the site after they accept a new privacy policy. The company’s first priority, according to an FAQ, is launching a new Firefox 4 extension.

Hurley and Chen, both immensely rich from their success with YouTube, are no longer running the Google-owned video site’s day-to-day operations. Chen left as CTO circa June 2009, while Hurley officially handed over CEO duties to Salar Kamangar in October 2010.

Delicious was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. Founder Joshua Schachter is now running a new company, Tasty Labs. Yahoo had announced internally that it would “sunset” Delicious in December.

Here’s the full release and statement from Yahoo:

Yahoo! Statement
Today YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen announced they have acquired the Delicious technology from Yahoo!. They plan to continue the service that users have come to know and love and make the site even easier and more fun to save, share and discover the web’s “tastiest” content.

Providing a smooth transition for users is important to both companies. There will be a transition period where users can elect to sign up for a new account. Users’ public and private bookmarks will be maintained through the transition period and transferred as they are today when it is complete.

As we have said, part of our product strategy involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation. We believe this is the right move for the service, our users and our shareholders and look forward to watching the Delicious technology develop.

Press Release
YOUTUBE FOUNDERS ACQUIRE DELICIOUS FROM YAHOO!

Promise Users the Same Great Service And Even Easier & More Fun Ways To Save, Share, and Discover the Web’s “Tastiest” Content.

San Francisco, CA., – April 26, 2011 – Delicious.com, the leading social bookmarking service, has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. Their vision for Delicious is to continue to provide the same great service users love and to make the site even easier and more fun to save, share, and discover the web’s “tastiest” content. Delicious will become part of AVOS, a new Internet company.

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

“We spoke with numerous parties interested in acquiring the site, and chose Chad and Steve based on their passion and unique vision for Delicious,” said John Matheny, SVP of Communications and Communities at Yahoo!.

The YouTube founders plan to work closely with the community over the next few months to develop innovative features to help solve the problem of information overload. “We see this problem not just in the world of video, but also cutting across every information-intensive media type,” said Chen.

Going back to their roots, Hurley and Chen located Delicious in downtown San Mateo, California, blocks away from where they started YouTube. They’re aggressively hiring to build a world-class team to take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.

About Delicious
Delicious is the leading social bookmarking service for saving, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. Started in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, Delicious has built a passionate, worldwide community of millions of users. In 2011, Delicious was acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Previously, they co-founded YouTube, the world’s largest video site in 2005, which was acquired by Google 18 months later for $1.76B. Delicious is part of AVOS, a new Internet company based in San Mateo, California.

The San Francisco-based company helps its customers manage compliance with brand guidelines as well as regulations from the SEC, FINRA and the FTC. That’s especially important when local representatives and franchisees are networking with and recruiting their own clients under the banner of a corporate name.

It also helps these types of companies push out social media content for their local representatives to personalize, and analyze the effectiveness of their efforts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The idea isn’t to make social networking boring and corporate, necessarily, but rather to provide sample content to riff off and to flag inappropriate updates before they go up.

Hearsay stems from the work of co-founder and CEO Clara Shih, who wrote “The Facebook Era,” an early book about how businesses can use social networks. Shih then wanted to found a company around those ideas, and iterated her efforts until she found a fit. The company has been in stealth mode since 2009, but it is already cash-flow positive.

Hearsay raised a little more than $3 million in funding last March in a round by Sequoia Capital. Other investors are Michael Abbott (Twitter), Steve Chen (YouTube), Ron Conway (SV Angel), Nils Johnson, David Lawee (Google), Thomas Layton (former OpenTable), Dave Morin (Path), Patrick Pohlen (Latham & Watkins), Alberto Savoia (Google), Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures) and Aaron Sittig (former Facebook).

In a note published on his Facebook profile, Agarwal said:

I am extremely inspired by the changes that Facebook has affected throughout the Internet ecosystem and how it has changed user expectations about great products. Our Platform has created a unique set of opportunities for building products on the foundations of the social graph. It will be the cornerstone of many future disruptions, some of which I hope to accelerate.

Agarwal’s projects have included Facebook newsfeed, search, ads, user commerce and services infrastructure. He said his last day would be Dec. 3.

Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu said via email, “After nearly five-and-a-half years, Aditya Agarwal has decided to leave the company. Aditya has been a key contributor since Facebook’s early days and while he’ll be greatly missed, we wish him all the best as he considers his next adventure.”

Agarwal did not specify what his next project will be. His wife, Ruchi Sanghvi, was Facebook’s first female engineer and left the company in August. (The two joined Facebook as a couple in mid-2005 after graduating from Carnegie Mellon.)

Agarwal is not Facebook’s only director of engineering; others with that title include Andrew “Boz” Bosworth and Robert Johnson.

Facebook has given employees the option to cash out some of their shares through secondary markets, and plus, early members of the team have at this point just been there a long time. Meanwhile Facebook has put new people, both hires and acqhires, in charge. As I wrote in a feature for GigaOM a few months ago:

Staying at a tech startup for more than four years–the default stock option vesting schedule–is a rare thing, but it seems notable that at 6-year-old Facebook, many early and influential employees have moved on, several of them recently. Facebook is an unusual employer, having been incredibly successful while steering clear of the public markets longer than expected. Employees who leave are often emboldened by their work on such an influential and widely used product, and want to start their own companies. Others are burned out. Still others feel stifled by the company’s management structure.

Although it’s obviously hard to see your comrades leave, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had an interesting and somewhat counterintuitive explanation for the stream of people leaving the company in an interview he gave about a year ago:

“We’re not pretending we’re building a company that hackers are going to want to work at forever,” Zuckerberg said, pointing to former employees like Steve Chen (who stayed at Facebook for only a short time before starting YouTube). Zuckerberg added his hope was to build a place where people could learn to build high-impact products–”a great hacker institution in the long term.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The move will be a formal acknowledgment of a practical reality: The video site is already under the day-to-day control of Google veteran Salar Kamangar, and industry insiders have been speculating that Hurley would step out for more than a year. Hurley himself told TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters that he’s been a de facto advisor for the past two years.

Hurley’s departure means that all three of YouTube’s co-founders have moved on. Jawed Karim had left the company before Google acquired it for $1.65 billion in 2006, and Steve Chen left his spot as chief technology officer in the fall of 2008. No word on what Hurley’s next full-time gig will be.

UPDATE: Hurley’s official statement, released via Google tonight, reiterates what he’s already said onstage–”For the past two years, I’ve taken on more of an advisory role at YouTube as Salar Kamangar has led the company’s day-to-day operations. I will continue to serve in an advisory capacity and am excited to witness the next phase of YouTube’s growth.”

Here’s Hurley and Chen in what still may be my favorite YouTube video, shot shortly after they sold their start-up: