Hacking on Freebase
Today, fighting a cold, I’m hacking in a totally unattractive way. I’d love to redeem my hacking status by heading up to the Freebase Hack Day in a couple of weeks, but unfortunately that’s the week I’ll be visiting my corporate masters in Southern California. Don’t worry, I already sent in my absentee vote. Democracy is still safe in our great nation.
For anyone else who has any ability to go spend a day, or even a few hours, at the Metaweb offices in San Francisco, I highly recommend going. Freebase has always been a cool platform, but it’s suffered somewhat from being overwhelming and difficult to approach. The team is about to roll out Acre, a new application development platform, which makes it easy to create new applications and new ways to play with the content. I hope to have time to play with Acre soon myself, because my brief introduction to it was really intriguing. One of the things I love best about it is that it allows you to discover new things about the content you already know. Connections between things, similarities (and lack thereof!). Check out the video to get a better idea of how it works…
The data in Freebase is growing continually, and is already far too big to really understand as a whole. Creating windows into this data, or different ways to understand it, is one of those cases where it’s almost more fun to create the solution than it is to come up with the problem. So take this great opportunity to get yourself some interesting company, a t-shirt, free food, and time to play with some excellent toys.
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