I’d love to be able to write about Yahoo’s new Pipes feature/service/thingamajig — if only so that I could cram in a bunch of puns about the pipes getting full or calling the plumber, etc. like some of the comedians here — but in what has become an all-too familiar event when a new service launches, it has been taken offline due to server overload (and while we’re on the subject, why didn’t they call it Yahoo Tubes? Much better name).

That might be understandable if we were talking about a couple of guys working out of their college dorm room, or someone’s basement in SoHo, with a few old roped-together SparcStations and a leased line from Verizon or something like that. But why wouldn’t Yahoo — which no doubt has half a dozen football-field sized server farms stationed around the continent, with hundreds of thousands of PCs humming away inside — put a few more servers online for their new toy? Going down right out of the gate just looks so bush league.

As for the service itself, I know that people like Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web like this idea of remixing RSS feeds and other things, and Jeremy at Yahoo does a good job of describing the thinking behind it — a guy I like to call Radar O’Reilly (old M.A.S.H. reference) calls it a “milestone in the history of the Internet” — but I just don’t get it.

This looks like pretty hardcore geekology, it seems to me. Not that it isn’t of value, but definitely something that would appeal mostly to people building other things, rather than as a consumer-facing service. If I ever get a chance to actually look at it, maybe I will think differently.

In this era of YouTube and Revver and video “mashups,” it seems like remixing media is the order of the day, and now there are half a dozen online video-editing tools like Jumpcut, Eyespot, MotionBox and VideoEgg that allow users to upload and edit video quickly and easily. It would be easy to dismiss this kind of thing as a goofy fad that appeals only to teenagers and people with a webcam and too much time on their hands, but I think things like this appeal to a real human desire to create and share, and the Zimmer Twins is a perfect example.

I’d never heard of the Zimmer Twins until this afternoon, but I happened to be watching my eight-year-old daughter Zoe playing on the computer next to mine, and she was doing something on a website, and laughing away to herself. Then she said: “Dad, do you want to watch my movie?” So I went over to her PC and she was at the Zimmer Twins website, where you can mix and match short clips from the animated show on the Teletoon network — using a storyboard strip with drag and drop features — and write captions right into the panel.

I have to say I was blown away. In just a few minutes, Zoe had created her own little animated short, complete with soundtrack and storyline (and some spelling mistakes too, of course, altough I pretended not to notice those). Pretty amazing. The YouTube of the future had better watch out.