Freebase is like a combination of Google Base and Wikipedia.

It wants to be a big structured open database. If you realize it's called Free Base, and relate that to a free & open version of Google Base, you get most of the point (assuming you are one of the .00003% of web users who have ever heard of Google Base).

But Freebase also has a presentation layer like Wikipedia, with destination pages that can be edited. It has nice tools for version control and adding semantic data to each page.

Finally, Freebase has an API -- as does Google Base. There's a query language called MQL ("Meta Query Language"), and a HTML templating engine based on javascript called "mjt". So it could be good fodder for mash-ups & splogs. It could be spammed eventually as well (like Base and Wikipedia).

However, I think Freebase faces some key obstacles in gaining mind-share:

• Freebase doesn't really do any one thing well.
• It's not as obvious as Wikipedia.
• Worse, Wikipedia already exists and solves most users' needs when looking up obscure facts.
• Google Base also already exists, and it's needed / subsidized by Google - so it's gonna have more traffic, traction and participation.

Freebase is an exploratory semantic web blob. I'm personally of the Clay Shirky school when it comes to semantic web stuff. I.e. it's not really good at anything, and it's a research problem to determine if it ever will be. The people that get excited about this stuff fall into a small subset of the .00003% who know what Google Base is.

In other words, Freebase has no killer-app which would compel a web user to use it. The ones it could eventually have were taken by someone else first.

With Danny Hillis as a backer of the parent company (MetaWeb), Freebase will probably end up as a good playground for the Semantic Web-o-philes out there.

¶ 6/06/2007