The social web is creating great opportunities for product research.  Paul Kedrosky has been suggesting that web services will be “honey pots” for data.  He explains, “Usage of such services throws off wonderfully rich data that is almost certainly of use to someone, but too often it is not captured and represented in a usable form.”

Paul gets his wish.  Our favorite social picture service, Flickr, is now letting us all have a peak into picture meta-data.  The feature is called camera finder as explained by Stewart (founder of Flickr):

See the most popular cameras on Flickr, search by camera model, check our macro, portrait, night and action shots from each model, see the trends for camera usage by manufacturer and find reviews and pricing information - it’s like a whole, um, camera finder on a web site! If you’re curious about the capabilities of a new cameraphone, how good the little point and shoots are going or what people are using the latest digital SLRs for, it’s a pretty fantastic resource.

Paul suggests that the data generated from your web application (i.e. for example Pingomatic) might be worth more than the actual service.  Be careful with your data, but remember it is likely very valuable.

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