A Yahoo named Amr Awadallah whacked up a subtitle parody of 300 as a commentary on Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo.

As Microsoft, we are the Persian forces, coming to the free land of Yahoo to ask for submission or some such nonsense. Sunnyvale gets to be the bastion of liberal thought, while Redmond is portrayed as a uninspired collective wanting nothing more than to grow in size.

I can really only appreciate the design of the joke, because as a part of Microsoft, I have a more humane view of the company than the rest of the world. The part of this that upsets me is how handcuffed we are. There’s no effective way we at Microsoft can comment on this sort of thing with the same tone; it’d only be funny to my co-workers, while for anyone else it’d be in extremely poor taste.

As a postscript, you’ve got to enjoy the irony of an ad for this parody appearing on Facebook.

I rolled over an add on Facebook just now, and the URL caught my attention (though I must be honest, the temptation to slim my belly was there for the clicking). Look at that URL!

This is probably not going to get noticed by the majority of FB users, but it’s certainly one of those things; calling the users who actually click on your ads, and therefore generate revenue for your company, probably isn’t wise.

 Joshua Allen lays out a great recap of Open Social’s first two months of life, and the tea leaves are not reading in Google’s favor:

Social networking is Facebook’s core business, while it’s a side project for Google. Although Google has just attempted to add social networking to Google Reader (via Scoble), and is trying to take on Wikipedia with Knol, it remains to be seen whether they can be a great social networking platform. Even Umair Haq, the perennial Google fan-boy, admits that Google might not have the right DNA.

For those of us who have swallowed the blue pill and accepted Facebook as our online social aggregator, Adam Ostrow writes up a new IE Facebook toolbar for Mashable:

 

…Some third-party developers have built My FB Toolbar, a toolbar with much the same capabilities as the official one from Facebook for Firefox. With the toolbar, you receive alerts of new messages, wall posts, friend requests, and other notifications you would typically receive via email. There is also a Yahoo search box, which I presume is how the developers hope to make a little money from their endeavor.

(My FB Toolbar - Mashable)