After months in public beta, the recently spiffed up Octopus.com goes live June 27 with its fully functionally official version. Palo Alto-based Octopus is a free Web service designed to help users easily grab and organize content from anywhere on Web.

"The user experience on the Web today is bad," says Steve Douty, CEO of Octopus. "The newest statistics say that the average user only goes to ten different Web sites a month. The Web is like where TV in 1965, pre-cable, with most of the viewers going to the big three of Yahoo, AOL, and MSN for content. I think that's unfortunate."

Octopus' solution is designed to get user's beyond the "My Page" mentality of filtering in a limited number of pre-selected information sources and instead reach out to the entire Web. Octopus Views can be set up to pull information from the Web under numerous categories such as news, sports, finance, games, shopping, etc.

Octopus already includes a directory of user-created Views to start with that can also be edited. Some 14,000 Views have been created during the beta period. Also, once you've created a View, you can email it to friends and associates to use. Octopus has done away with mandatory registration to use the service.

"I really like the redesign they've done, and it's a genuinely useful site," says Barry Parr, Director of Consumer Ecommerce Research at International Data Corp. in Mountain View. "It's much easier to use than when it first came out, but I don't think it will ever be as easy to use as Yahoo because you can't do all the things (Octopus does) and be that easy. So they're going after a select group of heavy Internet users, but the good news is that that's a very influential group of people."

Douty argues that Octopus makes it easier to find information buried deep in sites and across the Internet. "Web usability is a disaster," says Douty. "Surfers typically follow a long and often pointless path of 'link, click, back, back, and start again' through page after page, to find what is important or relevant to them."

An Octopus View can be a pretty elaborate affair with multiple windows of, for example, your favorite stocks, news, traffic reports and weather. Octopus lets you "clip" content from any Web page and drop it into an Octopus view, so for example, you could grab a stock ticker off a financial Web site and add it to your view.

One other unique aspect to Octopus is that the site itself has no paid advertising. "We don't want to sell them. Ads are really the province of the top 20 Web sites," says Douty. "We get paid for performance, which in our case is sending other Web sites bona fide traffic."

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Down the road, Douty says Octopus plans to expand the service by, among other things, offering a way to subscribe to Views created by others.