Twitteronia is a scary place to be. A Googler got violent, an NBC TV host swore, and we frightened a top AP editor — while Michelle Malkin had a breakdown. Today's twittiest tweets:

Bare-bones but eminently useful bookmarking site Delicious has gotten a long-awaited makeover, dropping the dots that confounded copy editors ("Del.icio.us") in exchange for cupcakes. It only took two and a half years from the time Yahoo bought the startup from founder Joshua Schachter — and a month after Schachter quit Yahoo in frustration with company's bureaucracy. The new layer of visual frosting is likely meant to help give the site mass appeal, though wonky top links on the hompage like "A simple unix/linux daemon in Python - Lone Wolves - Web, game, and open source development" won't help.

Del.icio.us, along with Flickr and Upcoming, was a Web 2.0 darling acquired by Yahoo a few years ago. Also like Flickr and Upcoming, Del.icio.us hasn't rolled out much in the way of new features — though don't blame founder Joshua Schachter, who quit today last Wednesday. Blame Yahoo's management, who pushed Schachter aside.

Kevin Rose takes up 62 out of 294 pages in Sarah Lacy's Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, her new book about Web 2.0. That's less than I expected, since Rose was the coverboy for the BusinessWeek story, co-written by Lacy, which launched her book. From the look of the index, not much time is spent on the women Rose is said to have "plowed through", as his friend Alex Albrecht once put it:

Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo's vice president of "social search," was among those laid off today. Yahoo's attempts to harness its vast user base to improve search results has never borne fruit. Since Yahoo has said it's cutting back in areas not deemed critical to its future, is Bonforte's departure a sign that social search no longer matters? Unlikely, since Yahoo recently incorporated Del.icio.us, the Web bookmarking service it bought from Joshua Schachter in 2005, into its search results. And management of Yahoo Answers, another Bonforte responsibility, was moved to Europe. More likely Bonforte, ostensibly Schachter's boss, was deemed inessential to the effort. Yahoo's layer-cake bureaucracy is being sliced away.

Andy Baio, the entrepreneur who created group calendar site Upcoming.org and sold it to Yahoo two years ago, is leaving the company. Not surprising that a company founder would leave after an acquisition, especially after two years, since that's a typical length of time for shares to vest under a deal's earnout provision. But Baio was part of a generation of startuppers brought in to transform Yahoo in the wake of that company's groundbreaking acquisition of Flickr — like, for example, Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, shown here rocking out with Baio. Schachter is still a presence at Yahoo. But what's most notable about the list of people Baio thanks in his farewell post are the ones who are no longer there — or are on their way out.

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson has had it up to here with unsolicited emails from PR agencies. But he's the beneficiary when colleagues use the tactic. Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter notes that his inbox is filled with unsolicited emails from Wired flacks. Sent to an email address, Schachter points out, which is on his blog, not one he uses to sign up for mailing lists. Call it the Long Tail of PR. Whether or not Anderson approves, he certainly gains from the PR mail-all list: The most recent Wired message touts Wednesday's edition of the PBS show Wired Science, and the subject line highlights a special appearance by Anderson himself.

While other startup founders have to stay home and, you know, work, these guys have the time and the spare $3,000 to spend hanging out at a zero-agenda conference in Hawaii. (For the record, we're jealous.) Spotted in Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz's Flickr stream: Benchmark entrepreneur-in-waiting Nirav Tolia; "stepped-up" LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman; FeedBurner founder Dick Costolo, who's rolling in Googlebucks; Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale; Evan Williams from Twitter; Mashery's Oren Michels; and
Kevin Rose (and his new haircut) from Digg with Joshua Schachter from the Yahoo-owned Del.icio.us. One question: Is this really Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg? I don't recognize him looking so unnerdly. (Photo by: bradley23)

MIT's prestigious Technology Review profiles the King of Tags, Yahoo's Joshua Schachter, and names the del.icio.us maker its Innovator of the Year.

As I said, a growing startup should expect to one day rise above pushing publicity through A-list bloggers like TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Today, Mike grumbles about that very phenomenon.

9:00 P.M. Under Route 101.
It is nightfall. The almost-silhouetted gangs come in from separate sides: climbing over the fences or crawling through holes in the walls. There is silence as they fan out on opposite sides of the cleared space. Then one of the Yahoos' Sidekicks rings, and they really have to take this call, so everyone waits and a few Googlers check in on Dodgeball.

Online boutique Etsy — think of it as a hipper eBay for handmades — would be just another dot-com, except for the familiarity of its funders. VC Fred Wilson names the Etsy angel investors:

Everyone knows that Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield were made for pretty photos. Flickr's founding couple does a great job sexing up the cover of the latest Newsweek as the poster children for the new feel of the Net. In case you missed the last three years of what Newsweek calls "the Living Web," here's an intro to the cast.