Longtime Internet entrepreneur Al Warms paid a visit to BoomTown HQ today to show off a new company he has founded called Appolicious.

That is the unusual name Warms–who sold his Participate Media, along with its BuzzTracker content aggregator, to Yahoo in late 2007–has given to a start-up aimed at encouraging discovery and social networking in the Apple iPhone mobile apps market.

The site is kind of a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo, but devoted solely to organizing and making sense of the app galaxy in the universe of smart phones.

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Last week, StumbleUpon announced it was buying itself out of its much-vaunted previous corporate buyout, by being born again as an “investor-baked start-up.”

The Canadian-born social-bookmarking company, which was launched earlier, came to the Bay area in 2006 and got some fancy venture investors and soon became a traffic-generating hit.

Then StumbleUpon was bought by eBay two years ago for $75 million in one of Web 2.0’s high points.

End of a fairy tale? Um, nope.

Here’s CEO and co-founder Garrett Camp, talking to BoomTown in a video interview about it all.

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The content-discovery service, StumbleUpon, has gotten itself back to start-up status, after being bought by eBay two years ago.

It announced today that it was returning to being an “investor-backed startup” by a roster of well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures, Accel Partners and August Capital.

Its founders, Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, are also back, with Camp now in place as CEO.

“We are grateful to eBay for its guidance. However, we realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses. It is best for us to part ways and focus on our respective strengths,” said Camp, stating the very obvious.

That’s quite a boomerang since it was acquired by the auction giant in 2007 for $75 million.

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While rumors of its impending re-sale have apparently been greatly exaggerated, what’s true about StumbleUpon is that its new Web-centric look and feel and a new partnering program represent a major shift for the online discovery service.

The San Francisco-based company, which was founded in 2001 and sold to eBay last year for $75 million, is announcing tonight that users will no longer have to register or download its toolbar to “stumble” the Web.

The move is being made because most Internet users are increasingly loath to install Web plug-ins, a requirement that naturally has slowed the growth of StumbleUpon’s service.

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