All Your Freebase Are Belong To Us

Amid much hype, Metaweb Technologies has announced Freebase which is described as “an open, shared database of the world’s knowledge.” This may sound familiar. Google said something very similar when they launched Google Base over a year ago. Although some speculated that Google Base would dominate eBay and Criagslist, the actual results have been much different. According to Hitwise, eBay’s market share is currently 844 times Google Base and Google Base is losing market share. To be fair, Freebase does not see itself in direct completion with eBay.

One significant difference between Google Base and Freebase is that Freebase will have an API for developers. Fundamentally, the idea behind Freebase is that it will be central repository to all the world’s information, which differs from the current structure of storing information on millions of servers indexed by search engines. Using the information’s metadata, Freebase hopes to develop programs that will be able to produce meaningful answers from the information instead of the linked lists currently produced by search engines. What is the reaction to Freebase so far? Tim O’Reilly thinks that this will be "HUGE" and addictive. Some are skeptical, but intrigued, others think it will be open and useful as long as it doesn’t achieve consciousness and kills us all, and one guys just thinks that it has a weird name.