Imagine There's a MicroHoo (It's Easy if You Try)

OK, we Photoshopped it, but only because we could not get our head around what the official Yahoo/Microsoft post-merger picture might look like.

With news that the pair were in informal talks, first broken by CNET, Boomtown still could not conceive of Yahoo (YHOO) CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang trading high-fives with Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, given Yang has thus far behaved as if the unsolicited bid from the software giant was akin to eating a bowl of worms.

But, in the words of the immortal John Lennon, “Imagine all the people/Living life in peace.” Thus we took that famous picture of AOL’s Steve Case and Time Warner’s (TWX) Jerry Levin (they seemed so happy at the time–who knew?) at the dawn of that dog of a merger and went to town.

BoomTown has always been an avid student of those always curious post-acquisition/merger shots that get taken as the first public visual expression of a deal.

For example, the genuine one, pictured below, of the Bebo/AOL union announced yesterday, with Bebo president Joanna Shields shaking hands with AOL CEO Randy Falco, while AOL President Ron Grant stands nearby, seems unusually awkward and uncomfortable to me, for example.

Is a picture worth a thousand words or are looks deceiving? You decide.