We’re excited and exhausted in about equal measures. After months of work, we’ve made the biggest and most noticeable change to Freebase.com since our alpha release more than a year ago. Dan’s just posted the release notes here.
The first thing you’ll probably notice is our new look and new logo.
If you’ve been to any of our user group meetings or signed up for Hack Day you’ll probably have seen the orange flag around already. Over time we’ll be rolling it out to other Freebase-related sites, including this blog, but for now we’re really happy to bring it to our main website.
Along with the new logo comes a new colour scheme and a very different look and feel for the website. Overall it’s lighter, brighter, and more approachable. Take a look at how the topic page looks now:
We’ve also reworked some of the top level navigation on the site. The old “Data” page becomes Explore, which lets you navigate the Freebase commons as well as user-created bases (previously “user domains”).
The domain/base homepages look different too: more graphical, less arcane text. We’ve moved the focus a bit from types and schemas to saved views. The types and schemas are still there, but putting the saved views up front makes it easier to understand what a base is all about, and encourages people to join and contribute.
Check out some of our featured bases, like Wearing My Religion or Saturday Night Live, and commons domains like Architecture or Astronomy.
The Make page takes over from the old “Apps” page. “Make” is a resource for anyone who wants to build stuff with Freebase, whether it’s a base or an application. The biggest change here is the official introduction of Acre, aka freebaseapps.com, a hosted app development platform using server-side Javascript.
We’ve had a number of developers working with Acre over the last few months, but this is its first broad release. Of course, we’re looking forward to helping people build lots of Acre apps at our Hack Day on the 8th.
There’s a lot in this release, and we can’t put it all in one blog post, so we’ll be making a series of more detailed posts over the next few days. Stay tuned!
