Freebase is interesting. I have played with it since the beginning, and I spent a lot of time with it recently because I just wrote a chapter for my new book on Freebase.<p>Freebase compares a little with DBpedia in that users contribute data to both (for DBpedia this is indirect since Wikipedia metadata is automatically scraped).<p>For me, Freebase became easier to use when they started generating RDF for queries.