Have you ever looked at your Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) Flickr account and thought, "Why am I doing this? I can just throw my pics up on Facebook"? If this has crossed your mind, you're not alone. In fact, many photo-sharing sites – Snapfish (NYSE: HPQ), Photobucket, Picasa (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Shutterfly, as well as Flickr – are asking the same questions. With the development and enhancement of photo management capabilities in major social networking websites, niche players need to find new ways to stay relevant.

The situation is still far from grim. Fed by traffic from their behemoth owners, the photo-sharing sites remain substantial forces, and they are currently home to more than 20 billion pictures. There's still plenty of interest in these environments ... which has been bolstered by specific features that make the likes of Flickr attractive to both professional photographers and amateur shooters. The ability to order prints and personalize portfolios, for example, still provides an edge over sites like Facebook and MySpace (NYSE: NEWS).

Nonetheless, the threats from the social networking space are quite real.

Antonio Rodriguez started Tabblo back in 2005. He wanted to leverage Web 2.0 technologies to build a much better photo site. He certainly did. With Tabblo, you can build web pages (called "tabblos") that allow for commenting, sharing and, yes, viewing. And, you can also make printed versions (sent to any US address).

Well, now the company has a new owner: Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ).

It looks like a smart move. HP does have Snapfish but it must deal with Web 2.0 upstarts like Yahoo's (Nasdaq: YHOO) Flickr. It looks like HP will allow Tabblo to be independent and be kind of a laboratory. With it, HP is likely to learn a great deal about social networking. There should also be some synergy with HP's huge printer biz.

Tabblo does have a thriving community, with about 5 million photos. But, with increased resources and distribution, we are likely to hear much more from the company.

Interestingly enough, Rodriguez has been a long-time admirer of HP. He still uses his HP-29C calculator he got from his dad while in college.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.