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Odeo, a podcast directory founded in 2005 by Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter fame that was acquired by SonicMountain over a year ago, has relaunched with a completely new design and slew of features.

The biggest addition to the site is video. Odeo now features millions of syndicated audio and video episodes aggregated from over 500,000 channels. Odeo has partnered with major content publishers like Revision3 and NextNewNetworks, and Blip.tv to fill its catalog.

Odeo has also improved its social side by enabling users to create profile pages, subscribe to preferred channels, and create playlists. Users can browse by keyword or category to get recommendations, leading to better content discovery. Users can also share content via email or embed it into blogs and social networks.

In addition to the content partnerships, Odeo has joined up with a startup called MatchMine to use its MatchKey service. MatchKey is a partner network that takes users’ preferences and distributes them across a network of sites to enable better personalized recommendations.

Odeo is currently working to bring back an upgraded version Odeo’s Studio, its free in-browser podcast recording service (we weren’t impressed with the old version). Its new development team will also add features like the ability to sync with portable devices and comment on videos and audio files. FireAnt, another podcast directory that competed with Odeo before getting acquired by it, was best-known for its desktop media player. Odeo has plans to bring back this player as well and distribute it as a white-labeled media player for enterprises.

We first covered Odeo in June 2005 when it was still in private beta. After about a year of struggling with competitors (most notably Apple’s iTunes), Williams launched a now-well-known startup, then called Twttr, in July 2006.

In September 2006, Williams bought Odeo back from its investors and started a new company called Obvious. Under Obvious, Williams held both Odeo and Twitter as wholly-owned subsidiaries. Odeo was then put up for sale in February 2007 and sold at a loss to Sonic Mountain a few months later. SonicMountain proceeded to acquire FireAnt and Blogdigger, a blog search engine. Odeo has since raised $2.5 million from private investors, and this is the first improvement we’ve seen since SonicMountain has taken over.

Odeo committed a number of mistakes the first time around, several of them openly admitted by Williams himself. Will Odeo’s new development team learn from these mistakes and guide Odeo to a brighter future? They are entering the video space, which is very competitive and is not as forgiving of mistakes. Best of luck, Odeo.

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Odeo as we know it is gone. After announcing itself in February 2005, the company raised a $5 million venture financing with Charles River Ventures and a bevy of angel investors. After a private beta period, the company launched in July 2005.

It’s now a little over a year later and Odeo now faces dozens of competitors, including iTunes. Founder Evan Williams has spoken publicly about the company’s mistakes, has shut down one service and has launched another. If anything, Odeo gives every indication of going sideways.

Instead of a dramatic business change along with a new round of financing, Odeo has kicked out its investors and is going it alone. Evan Williams along with Biz Stone and all other current Odeo employees have created a new company called Obvious Corp. This new company has purchased the assets of Odeo, Inc. (including Odeo and Twitter) from the investors and other shareholders. Evan told me “I decided to buy the assets myself and make Odeo and Twitter part of a new entity with a new structure and new model.”

The buyout price is undisclosed, but is presumably a little more than the $5 million in capital the company raised - Evan says it is “enough for the VCs and angel investors to be made whole (i.e., they get their money back), and the common shareholders (including co-founder Noah Glass) to make a modest gain.”

What’s the new Model? Evan says this:

Everyone I know in the web world either works for one of the Internet giants and wants to be in a startup or is in a startup that wants to be bought by an Internet giant. The grass is always greener, of course, but I believe there’s room for a different model for building and running web properties. Obvious will be a kind of product lab, which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. There are many details to be figured out, but the general idea is to simply build and launch things that we want to exist in the world, with a high degree of freedom. And to do so cheaply and quickly, with self-organized teams that can leverage each other’s technology, talents, and traffic. Rather than looking to be acquired, we plan to make money from the services and share it with the people who contribute. Occasionally, it may make sense to spin things out into their own entities, which get outside investment, but the company is not an incubator.

More from Evan in his blog post here.

Our previous coverage of Odeo is here.

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Tags: techcrunch, podcast, podcasting, web2.0, web_2.0