I have a confession to make. I have an embarrassing problem that I am hoping someone out there can help me with. Maybe it's better if I just come out and say it...

I just don't get what all the fuss is about Flickr!

Everywhere I go on the internet I see this service hailed as a revolution, the next big thing. This culminated in an article I recently read in the Guardian by Ben Hammersley in which he referred to Flickr as "...perhaps the smartest and richest online application ever written". That was enough for me. I need someone out there to share the good news with me.

Here's what I do understand. Flickr enables its users to tag and attach comments to images which are posted online. I can see that this provides a neat way around the difficulties of searching for pixellated images which would not otherwise have any relevant search keywords associated with them.

But so far, so good, so what? Such tags surely aren't in themselves the killer app. Technorati promotes them for blog posts, and del.ici.ous does the same for link-sharing. Both these applications for meta-tagging would appear to me to have more potential usefulness than image sharing. The reason I say this is that I don't see the revolutionary potential behind millions of people searching through each other's holiday snaps. I can see it may be fun for a while for some people, but I can't see that it's going to change the way millions of people think about and do everyday things in the same way that, say, Ebay did.

I have read some ambiguous quotes hinting that the real revolution of Flickr is about much more that photo sharing, but if so I just can't grasp what it is, and I haven't found anyone yet who can clearly explain it to me. If you can find it in your heart, I'd be grateful if you could let me in on the big idea.