It's hardly surprising that Myspace would decide to play hardball with Photobucket, the photo sharing service most popular among users of the social network. Photobucket's CEO, in an ill-advised boast to Fortune magazine, said that users could keep their snaps with Photobucket, even "if one social networking site goes away and another comes up." That was tempting fate. As Valleywag noted, News Corporation, Myspace's owner, has no compunction about squeezing weaker players. And now, by preventing the display of videos hosted on Photobucket, the News Corp unit has shown its power. There are lessons for other web ventures.

First of all, be careful who you pitch to. Photobucket's investment bankers, prepping the company for a $300m sale, have projected incredible revenue growth in 2007; glossed over the company's bandwidth costs; and talked up the loyalty of the users of its photo sharing and display service. That may impress various tech news sites — but at the risk of annoying Photobucket's real audience, a small group of potential acquirors, who are definitely interested in Photobucket, but don't like to be snowed. Myspace could well have turned off access to the Photobucket video feature for technical reasons, but there is a side-benefit: the move puts the photo service in its place, and recalibrates its expectations of a giant deal payday.

There is a broader lesson. There are relatively few opportunities to create web brands as powerful as Myspace or Facebook, the two leading social networks. Also-ran sites tend, rather than simply folding, to piggyback on these standalone sites. In the best case, this can be an efficient marketing tactic. After all, Google grew by providing search for Yahoo users; by the time Yahoo switched off the Mountain View search engine, it was way too strong to stop.

But that's the exception. Most of these smaller products remain dependent: they can persuade themselves that they're spreading, cunningly, virally, through other sites; they can define themselves as a movement; predict web functionality will be distributed, and reassembled; that the standalone website is over; they can even attend conferences with fellow "widget" makers to make themselves feel like part of a movement. But that's simply the rationalization of failure: the only real power, on the web as in traditional media, is to control distribution, or a brand so powerful that consumers insist on it. If Photobucket can't face down Myspace, there isn't much hope for the myriad other widget companies with a fraction of its user base.