There's a melodramatic "war" brewing between Facebook and Google, and Facebook's CEO is seizing the opportunity to squeeze more work from his engineers, declaring a "lockdown," keeping the office open on weekends, and putting a neon sign on his door.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has attached the glowing word "LOCKDOWN" to his office door, VentureBeat's Anthony Ha reports, and has declared that the company is in an official lockdown for the next 60 days as it races to improve its photo, group and events features. Traditionally at Facebook this means that no one is supposed to leave until the task at hand is done, but presumably the much larger Facebook of today has to pay more heed to labor laws as it scrambles to prepare for the launch of a rumored (but probably inconsequential) Google social network called Google Me.

Tech reporters have historically been obsessed with these sorts of conflicts between large companies. The fights rarely live up to the hype, but they do generate a lot of free publicity for the corporations involved and, as in Facebook vs. Google, provide a nice excuse to make Silicon Valley's already taxed young programmers work even harder. Not that we're crying for any engineer with Facebook stock options, however.

[Photo: Zuckerberg at a Facebook "launch night," via Pierre Moreels/Facebook]