MindMeister: Collaborative Online MindMapping Tool

I've been using mindmapping software for quite a while (ever since Version 1 of Visio) now to help me think.  I'm mentoring in Nancy White's online facilitation workshop and she just shared a pointer to this tool.  I had to play with it.  I used to help me with some preparation for tomorrow's presentation on tagging.

You don't get as much control over the look and feel of your mind map as you would with say MindManager, although you can import an MindManager file.   But, you can create a collaborative mindmap online using this application.

Update:  Some more reflection on it .. after John Smith pinged me and Nancy about an experiment with this tool ..

Does collaboration on the mindmapping tool work best in real time or asynchronous - or does it not matter?

I'm wondering whether it would get messy if you used it to take notes during a meeting in real-time with too many people editing? Like the same thing when you use a wiki for that?

My questions:

Does this tool work best on a collaborative activity that is:

-brainstorming
-capturing meeting notes during the meeting and serve as support - similar to what graphic facilitators do -brief reflection after a meeting

Do you have a free for all?  That is everyone jump in an edit in real time or do we conceptualize it like a wiki?

It feels like a visual wiki to me ... so are any of the roles/patterns in wiki appropriate to port over there?

Comments

[Argey]

If you like mindmapping, have you used it to organize information after you've done your meeting facilitation, idea collection or planning? There's a product for information management that uses the mindmapping approach, but can scale up big - 3D Topicscape.
Perhaps you'd like to see if it looks interesting. It's at
http://www.topicscape.com

[Christian Kreutz]

I have been using it for more than two months and like it very much to brainstorm.
When I use it in real time collaboration it becomes easily chaotic if more than one person work simultaneous on it. But it really helps to structure a conversation during a conference call because everybody can follow and comment on it.

When you use it in an asynchronous way it can be also helpful for creative exchange, however it is not always easy to follow the fairly abstract branches and nodes from another person. It certainly needs improvement to highlight better the revisions. Lastly I am curious whether many people want to pay 4 bucks a month for premium membership.

[Gaelen]

Hi Beth,

I just came across your post. I'm not sure if you knew yet but Mindjet just announced the release of MindManager 7 on May 30th. It has some exciting feature additions and will sport a new look and feel of the ribbon UI from MS Office 2007. Pretty cool. I'll send you the beta to play with now.

[David Storrs]

Hi Beth,

If you like MindMeister, you might also be interested in the following:

• Kayuda (my company's product)
• Mindomo
• TopicScape, as Argey recommends
• Bubbl.us
• Bubble-mind.com

I'll just put in a mini-plug for my team here: Kayuda is the only mindmapping product I'm aware of that lets you link any node to any node (even back to its parent or in a loop), we allow you to have unlimited amounts of formatted-text notes for each node, the text is autosaved, and--best of all--we are free (ad supported with two small text ads). There's a lot more, but I promised to keep it short.

You may have known about all these products already; if not, I hope one of them is useful to you.

—Dks

[Tom DeVilbiss]

I'm surprised to see this much conversation and no mention of Free Mind, the FOSS mind mapper. I downloaded it quite a while ago and haven't used it much, but it worked for what I needed it for at that time.

[Omar]

Our team just launched a new collaborative web-based mind mapping tool called Comapping. It is worth checking it out at comapping.com.
Regards, Omar