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Only hours after launching its new feeds meets mashup service, Yahoo Pipes has become clogged and is no longer online.

We're waiting to hear back from Yahoo about the Pipes service vanishing from the Internet.

(UPDATE!: 5:40 pm ET - We just heard back from Yahoo, and this is their statement on the state of Yahoo Pipes:

“Wow! We were hoping to have a low key release of Pipes, and we’ve gotten more attention than we could have ever dreamed. Thanks to Tim O’Reilly who called it a “milestone in the history of the internet” but our goal was really just to get developers to test it, play with it, and give us feedback. Now, we need to take the site down to increase capacity. Our pipes, are, so to speak, clogged.”

Pipes is an early stage prototype developed by the Technology Development group at Yahoo! that allows developers to mash-up web data. The tool is a drag and drop editor which enables you to connect multiple Internet data sources to suit your individual needs. We believe this is another step in turning the web into a programmable environment. We’re excited to put out this service for developers and curious to see what new and wondrous things they create. As with many products coming out of this group, we encourage you to test it, play with it, and give us your feedback.

There you go.)

It launched last night to considerable fanfare from a number of influential bloggers. People like publisher Tim O'Reilly and Six Apart's Anil Dash have commented favorably and at length about the service.

While we wait for it to return, we'll look at what another notable said about Yahoo Pipes. Self-described "feed syndication geek" Niall Kennedy summarized the good and the not great about Pipes at his blog:

The Pipes team, part of the Yahoo! Advanced Products group, has spent some time looking at how people consume syndicated content and what it might take to open up that experience to even more people.

Yahoo! Pipes opens up some interesting possibility for feed aggregators, letting users filter out unwanted content affecting their experience.

Yahoo! Pipes has implications for web publishers, changing the reliability of delivered content, the relationship with the end user, and the polling frequency of a mashup that may or may not be actively utilized.

Yahoo! Pipes makes it easy to remove advertising from feeds or otherwise reformat your content. I already know a few publishers who hold back the publishing the full content of their posts for fear of easy resyndication and brand dilution, and if Pipes becomes popular publishers might hold back a bit further or ban Yahoo! Pipes outright.

Resyndication issues exist now, just witness the various splogs that crop up populated with content siphoned off RSS. That's a tough issue for anyone whose content is who they are, and how they make a living online. We think someone clever will figure out a way to make Pipes work well for them.

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