MindMeister is Ãœber Cool
Wednesday, March 28th 2007 | Ismael Ghalimi
One of the must-have applications I had to leave behind when moving to a pure online setup was the excellent MindManager from Mindjet. Before going online, I used it for about a year, and it totally redefined the way I managed ideas and implemented the upstream parts of David Allen’s GTD process. Unfortunately, no online alternatives existed, until now…
I just received a preview account for MindMeister, and I am totally blown away. Granted, there have been a couple alternatives available for some time, such as bubbl.us, Kayuda, or Mindomo, but MindMeister seems to be the most promising of them. It does not have anywhere near the set of features currently offered by MindManager, but it has the same look and feel, with a streamlined user interface that makes it easy and quick to record ideas as they come, in a non-linear way. MindMeister also allows mind maps to be shared with others or published on the web, and offers graphical versioning capabilities for shared maps.
In the short term, what’s really missing is the ability to create hyperlinks from nodes in the map, and the ability to syndicate maps through RSS and JSON feeds, so that their content could be repurposed within other blogs and web sites. I would expect such features to become available fairly soon, as they seem to be relatively easy to implement, and are commonly found with alternative solutions.
In the long term, I would like to get a read/write REST API, and the ability to define types for nodes. One type that I would find very useful is the Task type, with simple Deadline and Status attributes — I don’t care for priorities, for they are not part of the GTD methodology. Having these would allow me to integrate MindMeister with Salesforce.com for facilitating task management. Whenever I would create a task node from MindMeister, it would automatically create a corresponding task within Salesforce.com, stored in relation to the custom MindMap object that would link to the map. Then, I would complete the task from Salesforce.com, which would automatically mark it completed onto the MindMeister mind map. I have been dreaming about such a workflow for quite some time, and it seems that we are getting pretty close to the time when it becomes possible.
MindMeister is currently in semi-private beta, which means that you have to register to their newsletter before receiving an invitation. You can also ask some friends for one, and I happen to have 20 invitations available. Drop me a line if you want one.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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[…] MindMeister is Ãœber Cool […]
Thanks for the pointer! It would be great to receive an invitation from you.
I want one.
Markus, Enrico,
I just sent you invitations. Enjoy!
-Ismael
It would be great for me as well… Thanks in advance!
Giancarlo,
You should have received one by now.
Best regards
-Ismael
Hi,
If you still have an invitation left, I would love to try this application. I am fond of mind mapping, and find it great to have all my maps with me everywhere…
Thanks in advance.
Best regards
Thanks.
I’d love an invitation if you still have one, please.
All the best,
Ryan
Ryan,
I just sent you one.
Best regards
-Ismael
Hello Ismael,
I’d love to get a MindMeister invite, if still available. Thanks!
Uriel,
Sure thing. I sent myself an invitation in order to create a second account and get another batch of 20 invitations. You’re the first to get one from this new batch. Enjoy, and let me know what you think about the application!
-Ismael
Hello Ismael,
I’d like an invite too.
I’ve tried bubbl.us and Mindomo, and so far I find Mindomo pretty strong.
Thanks
Roger,
I just sent you an invite. Mindomo has slightly more features than MindMeister, but the user interface is not as polished in my opinion. I hope MindMeister will catch up on the feature side though, and provide syndication capabilities soon.
Best regards
-Ismael
It’s amazing - keep up the work!!
Our team developed a new collaborative web-based mind mapping tool called comapping. Worth checking it out.
Regards
-Omar
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