Sunday, March 18, 2007

Using Freebase #1

I've been using Freebase for a few hours and have been pretty impressed by it.

My first impression is that a lot of thought has gone into this thing and there are some smart people behind it. Also, though there are some bugs here and there (its an alpha) the interface is very nice. It is really easy to use. They have a lot of neat (and helpful) AJAX features like auto-complete that are very usable.

On the API side I think they've done a pretty good job. Even in the early stages they have provided a lot of documentation on the API as well as a really neat query editor. If your the kind of person (like me) who learns something best by actually using it, this feature is really great. The screenshot below shows what I'm talking about. You can enter queries and see results and there are a lot of examples that show the syntax.

(Click to enlarge)

Look out for more reports on Freebase as I continue to use it.