MindMeister - Connective LearningI’m a big mind map person…just something about the visual tree effect that makes it easier for me to organize stuff. And I have loved FreeMind for a few years now. But the limitation has been that, well, it’s not very flexible in terms of social collaboration and stuff.

Enter MindMeister which has my mind a fluttering. It’s a web-based collaborative mind mapping app that so far, after about an hour’s worth of playing, is really letting me do great stuff. You can check out the intro video on the site, but here are the key features I’ve found so far that I’m liking a lot:

  1. Easy importing of my FreeMind Maps. You can do it with MindJet MindManager too. Nice.
  2. Drag and drop and easy keyboard tools. I love Ajax. (This is Ajax, right?)
  3. Sharing/collaboration. Just invite people in to play.
  4. In the best wiki tradition, it has a history so you can track changes. (Awesome.)
  5. You can publish your Maps to the Web, even embed them into a blog post.
  6. And while they don’t have an RSS feed to track changes, they do let you configure update alerts to your…wait for it…Twitter account.

They even have this cool little extension for MAC users that puts a little app on your desktop that you can post ideas or links to your default map in a flash. Mercy.

This has been a great couple of weeks for tools…Skitch, Jing, and now this. And the thing I love about all of them is that they are solving that little publishing hump in a very easy way by making the upload piece a seamless part of the process.

Prediction: Google buys MindMeister within six months…

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