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.

If you don’t already know about Adium, then you’re missing out.

Adium is an instant messaging client that permits you to use a single program to communicate with people on virtually every instant messaging service in the world. So you don’t have to worry about whether all your friends and colleagues are on MSN, or Yahoo, or AIM, or iChat, or Google Talk, or Skype, or, well, you get the idea.

That, alone, is a neat trick, but it’s hardly unique. There are other programs (such as the excellent Fire) which do the same thing.

Adium raises the bar in how you can communicate over each of these networks.