I know Google. I’m a close personal friend of Google. And Yahoo, you’re no Google.

Yahoo Pipes arrived last night to some geeky fanfare, and promptly got overloaded and crashed. Then they bulked up capacity and it came back up, and then it crashed again.

It’s a strange little program. It lets you take XML feeds from any number of sources and do… thing to them. Like concatenate them, filter them, or pipe the results through something else.

So, for example, you could take the URLs of everyone who commented on your blog, grab the RSS feeds from their blog, and put all the posts together into a single mega RSS feed. Or you could take apartment listings off CraigsList and search for crime reports for those streets, and pipe the search results into, again, an RSS feed.

This is the sort of thing that makes geeks all hot and bothered. The rest of the world can sit back and reap the rewards as a jillion “smart” feeds come out into the world to make everyone’s life easier.

Oh yeah, only geeks care about RSS/XML feeds anyhow… Dang.