SpiderScribe, which debuted last year as a beta web mind mapping application, has been officially released. For someone who has never done mind mapping before, its simple, well-designed drag-and-drop interface is very welcoming.

SpiderScribe enables you to easily build simple mind maps that incorporate text, images, maps and events, by simply dragging and dropping “stencils” into the workspace, arranging and connecting them – all in an easy-to-understand user interface. Even if you’ve never created a mind map before, you’ll find the process to be easy and intuitive. Unlike some programs, the developers of SpiderScribe provide a help page and demo video that are clear and easy to follow.

I created a simple map in SpiderScribe, which you can see above (click on the image to view a larger version). I’ve also embedded it in this blog post (below), so you can see how that works. The app behaved just as I would expect it to. Dragging and dropping a stencil into the workspace immediately opened a dialog box, where you could select the asset needed – such as an image or document to add.

A dialog box in the upper right corner of the workspace enabled me to adjust the properties of my stencils, changing the size and color of the font in a text stencil, for example, and even giving me the option of applying these settings to new stencils – a real-time saver!

A second dialog box acts as a high-level map viewer, so you can move quickly through larger, more complex mind maps. Both this panel and the properties one can be minimized to give you more screen real estate – nicely done!

Each stencil has a dotted border at the top, where you can drap and drop it to a different position with the workspace. Connecting items was a simple matter of dragging my mouse from the plus icon at the bottom of a stencil to a neighboring one. Controls in the upper left and right corners of each stencil enable you to quickly duplicate or delete it.

To keep your mind maps looking neat, you can snap topics – which SpiderScribe calls stencils – to a grid or aligned to other stencils. This worked very well. Rather than constantly displaying a grid in the background of the workspace, which would cause visual clutter, a dotted line only appears when the stencil you’re moving is aligned with its neighbors. The stencil popped into place with a satisfying jump, giving me visual feedback that the alignment had occured.

Opening and saving maps occurred quickly, with no lag time. Obviously, the code behind SpiderScribe is well-honed, and is running on some decent servers. Kudos to the developers for that.

Sharing maps is accomplished by clicking on a “share” button in the app’s toolbar. A dialog box enables you to send e-mail invitations to your colleagues to share your mind maps. You can control whether your map is public or private, and whether your collaborators have view-only or editing privileges.

This dialog box is also where you embed your maps. If you select “public on the internet” in the sharing settings, a link appears that enables you to embed it into your website. You can then copy and paste a set of “iframe” code to make this possible. Using this simple format ensures that your map will appear properly in most websites, blogs, Facebook pages and elsewhere. Controls in the dialog box enable you to specify the size of the map, the amount of your map you want to be visible and give it a description. This is a greater level of control than I would have expected from a version 1.0 app.

Here is what an embedded map looks like:

Conclusion

SpiderScribe is a well-designed first effort by its developer. One of the challenges of developing web-based mind map apps is making it simple enough for newbies to figure out, yet full-featured enough so that intermediate and experienced users will find value in it. The developers of SpiderScribe appears to have gotten this balance just right. I can’t wait to see what’s next with this terrific mind mapping app.

Mindomo, a popular web-based mind mapping application, recently added an interactive presentation mode that is surprisingly well-designed and easy to use. This makes it a snap to convert your mind maps created in Mindomo into presentations in a few easy steps, and then share them with others.

When you enter presentation mode, a blue translucent border appears over the central topic of your map, with drag handles on all four corners. By default, Mindomo is set up to display your map’s central topic as the first slide. This colored rectangle is how you select the area of your map that will be visible in each slide.

Adding a slide is as simple as holding down the shift key on your keyboard and dragging a new selection. When you release the mouse button, a new slide is added. A large white number appears over the region you’ve just selected, indicating its sequence in the slide show. This simple, intuitive approach makes it easy and fast to build up a slide show.

Icons representing each slide are displayed in the center of the toolbar at the top of presentation view. Each numbered square has a drop-down button to the right of it. When clicked, it gives you the option to present topics collapsed, add/remove topics from the slide or delete it. Icons can also be dragged to rearrange the order in which topics are presented. When you do so, the large numerals that hover over each selected map region are immediately updated.

What’s really interesting here is that you can easily deselect topics that you don’t want to appear in your presentation. This is valuable because often mind maps contain background information that you don’t necessarily want your audience to see, or proprietary information that they shouldn’t see. I clicked on a child topic on one of my maps branches, and it was immediately deselected – cool! I think it’s brilliant that Mindomo’s developers have made this possible.

At each step of building your presentation, Mindomo displays a charcoal gray box in the lower left corner of the screen that tells you what commands you can use. This is helpful when you’re first using this new feature of Mindomo, until you become more familiar with it.

You can view your presentation by clicking on the play button in the toolbar. Mindomo walks you through your pan with smooth zooms and pans. Nothing jerky here. It’s hard to believe this is taking place in a Flash environment, within a web browser. It feels like a desktop program. A mini-toolbar at the bottom of the presentation screen enables you to advance slides using a “play” button. As Mindomo walks you through the regions of the map you selected as slides, other topics are grayed out so that they are barely visible. The same treatment is applied to any child topics you deselected. They’re not completely gone, but simply “ghosted” to the point that you can hardly tell they’re still on-screen.

The mini-toolbar also contains buttons to back up a slide, share your presentation with others, toggle the browser to full screen and exit the presentation. This attractive navigation bar disappears when you’re not hovering your mouse over the bottom of the screen, giving it a very clean appearance. The only thing that’s missing here, in my opinion, is a popover message that shows you what each toolbar icon means as you hover the mouse cursor over it.

Mindomo makes it easy to share your presentations. A “share settings” dialog box enables you to adjust whether your map is public or private, gives you the capability to invite others via e-mail to view it, and lets you decide if each person can modify or simply view the map. A checkbox also enables you to auto-notify everyone whenever the map is modified.

I believe Mindomo has enabled you to share maps like this for some time now. What’s new is the ability to do so directly from presentation mode. I sent the map above to my home e-mail address and viewed it in a different web browser. Everything worked as expected; I was able to enter presentation mode and play the presentation I set up earlier without any problems.

Conclusion

The new presentation mode significantly expands what’s possible with this web-based application. Obviously, the developers of Mindomo have invested a lot of effort into user interaction design, because the presentation mode is very intuitive and easy to use. I love the way interface elements get out of the way when they’re not needed and how the application provides you with feedback to help you understand what you can do at each step. This isn’t some half-baked feature that’s still in beta testing, either. Mindomo’s presentation model has a polish and finesse to it that is really quite impressive.

Earlier this week, Pearltrees for iPad was launched, enabling collectors and curators of web content to do so on Apple’s popular tablet. The iPad’s touch interface is a perfect complement to this popular tool, which has signed up over 200,000 users for the web-based version of Pearltrees during the last year and a half. This functioned just the way I like it – seamlessly.

At the time I reviewed the browser version of Pearltrees in December 2009, I wasn’t quite sure what all the excitement was about. Since then, content curation has gotten a lot of attention, as business people and consumers alike seek ways to save interesting web content for future reference. Pearltrees for iPad extends this visual exploration model to the world’s most popular tablet, accessing your online Pearltrees account seamlessly. I hadn’t touched my Pearltrees account since doing my review almost two years ago; after logging in, the iPad app quickly loaded my map and enabled me to keep building them.

A powerful discovery tool

Pearltrees for iPad isn’t just an elegant tool for curating web pages in which you’re interested, it’s also a powerful tool for information discovery. If you select a “pearl” (an individual node in one of your maps) and then tap on a toolbar button called “related interests,” the application displays pearls that others have saved. This model of social curation has the effect of surfacing some of the best content on any given topic, making it a potentially great web exploration tool.

Clicking on a single pearl causes a pop-over window to appear, with a screenshot of the web page on one side and the text of the page on the other side. Tapping on a “pick” button enables you to add it to your map. You can select any of its major nodes, place it in the “drop zone” – a horizontal window embedded in the bottom toolbar that functions as a “parking lot” for pearls that you’re not quite sure what to do with yet – or create a new pearltree.

Sharing the good stuff you’ve found

From this dialog box, you can also share items you’ve found via e-mail, Twitter and Facebook. Doing so includes a link to that item within the context of a Pearltrees map – making it easy for you to share web pages of interest with your colleagues. I tried sending several items to my e-mail address. The first one, in which I accepted the app’s pearl-related subject line, never arrived – apparently the victim of a spam filter. The second time I tried it, I changed the subject line to a fake project name (“This web page is of interest for the ACME project”), and this time it came through. Apparently the word “pearl” is perceived by e-mail clients as being a bit spammy. Hmmm…

I copied and pasted the URL into a browser that I have never used with the web version of Pearltrees – just to see how it would be displayed to someone who doesn’t have an account with the service. it displayed the web page to which the pearl referred, with a narrow pop-up window embedded at the top of the page, identifying the pearltree from which it was sourced. It also contains “previous” and “next” buttons, so the person to whom you sent the pearl can explore other related resources and further share them via Twitter or Facebook.

Clicking on a “pearltrees” button in this horizontal banner displays the pearltree from which this web page came, along with the other pearls that surround it (just like the view I had of this topic on my iPad). The currently-selected page hovers over the top of the visual map, giving you a sense of context for how you got here. Hovering over any node in the pearltree causes this preview to display a snapshot of the corresponding web page – with buttons for adding it to your pearltree and sharing via the previously-mentioned services. The fact that you can share web pages of interest, even if you’re not logged in as a member of Pearltrees, is part of the reason this service has such a makes viral appeal – the app makes it simple and fun to share. Brilliant!

Adding content of interest from Safari

So how does this app enable you to add items to your Pearltrees when you’re browsing the web with Safari? The Pearltrees toolbar contains a button for the “pearler,” which installs a javascript-enabled entry in your Safari bookmarks. When you visit a web page that you want to add to your Pearltree, you simply tap on Safari’s bookmark icon and then on the Pearltrees bookmark. A window then pops up, asking you where you want the current web page to be added. Once again, you can select from any of your Pealtrees and their major nodes, the drop zone or create a new pearltree in which to place it.

Conclusion

I’ve been a bit surprised at Pearltrees’ success during the past several years. Not because of anything related to the product, but I just didn’t “get” how important web content curation would be to people. Now that it’s a hot topic, I understand what all of the excitement is about, and I applaud its developers for extending its reach to the Apple iPad.

Everything worked very smoothly and intuitively. It’s easy to get started with Pearltrees, without having to read any lengthy instructions. I’m impressed with the ways in which the developers have made the use of this app more viral.

If you want to create your own Pearltrees account, it’s free. You can create your own login, or connect with the service via your Facebook, Twitter and Google accounts. Once again, no barriers of entry here. It’s easy to get signed up and get “pearling.” If your work involves an amount of research or monitoring of key topics and trends, then you owe it to yourself to give Pearltrees for iPad – and web browser – a try.

MindMeister, the innovator in the web-based mind mapping space, continues to advance with the recent release of a major update, which includes a completely redesigned user interface, social sharing of maps created online, new MS Office export capabilities and much more.

Here’s what’s most notable in MindMeister 6:

Redesigned user interface: The first thing you notice when you open a map in MindMeister is that the user interface looks brighter. That’s because the properties panels on the right, which were formerly dark blue, now have a white background color. Also, this panel has been simplified. In the past, it took up the entire right side of the workspace, from top to bottom. Each of 5 sub-panels could be collapsed separately. The redesigned properties panel is now only half as tall, and can be collapsed in a single mouse click, giving you more screen real estate.

Improved notes functionality: One example of how the usability of MindMeister has been improved is the notes panel. In the past, it contained a toolbar, which enabled you to format your notes text. Usability studies must have confirmed that few users did so. As a result, the developers removed it from the panel and instead provided an unobtrusive “advanced” text link – which opens the notes in a much larger pop-over window, complete with a formatting toolbar. Undoubtedly, this also meets the needs of users who didn’t like the tiny text input window of previous versions. This solution meets the needs of novice users, yet gives power users access to more options with a single mouse click – nicely done!

Social sharing: With version 6.0, MindMeister users can now share maps quickly via e-mail, IM and Twitter with a unique link that has been shortened with the application’s new mm.tt link shortner. This was long overdue, considering the growing popularity of social media. You can share maps from either the map editing view or the “my maps” list. In a clever move, the developers consolidated map sharing (inviting people via e-mail to view and/or edit your map) and social sharing (via a shortened link). You need at least a MindMeister Pro account (US$9.95 per month) in order to use this functionality.

Map themes: MindMeister 6 now includes 12 colorful map themes, another feature that was probably long overdue. Almost all mind maps produced using MindMeister have looked the same – a blue central image with with angular connector lines joining topics and subtopics together, topic text on a plain line and a plain white background. Bleh! What a wonder it is to select a professionally-designed map theme, complete with smooth, rounded connector lines, topic box shapes and background colors.  Not only that, but you can click on a “customize map theme” button to further modify the look and feel of your MindMeister maps. With this improvement alone, MindMeister moves the state of the art of web-based mind mapping closer to the experience of using desktop software.

New map exporting options: MindMeister 6 can now export to Word (.docx) and PowerPoint (.pptx) formats. In previous versions, it was possible to share your maps as embedded images, but MindMeister maps were more or less “islands.” You couldn’t easily export their contents to other useful formats for further development and refinement. Now you can. Once again, this is a capability that users of desktop mind mapping software have had for years; it’s nice to see MindMeister making this capability available to users of its innovative web-based application.

Keep-aligned feature: In previous versions, users spent a lot of time dragging and dropping topics to align them with each other. In version 6.0, a new “keep aligned” tool automatically repositions your topics. I tried this on one of my existing right-facing mind maps, which had about 12 topics in moderate disarray, relative to each other. The second I clicked this option, all of the topics jumped into perfect alignment with each other. Not only that, but if I tried to drag one of them out of alignment, it immediately snapped back into position. This tool can be toggled on and off; if you want to have more control over the positioning of your map topics, you can simply switch it off.

MindMeister 6 includes numerous other improvements, which you can read about in the developer’s blog.

It’s great to see a developer listening to its customers and responding with terrific new features and functionality. MindMeister continues to get my recommendation as the top web-based mind mapping application available today.

I logged into my beta account, after choosing the option to convert it to a Webspiration Pro trial account, and had a look around. The interface is identical to what I saw when I first reviewed the beta version in 2008 (click the image above right to view a larger version). The application now offers nearly 50 mind map templates, a mixture of business (group project plan, problem solving process and social media campaign, for example) and college/educational (persuasive speech or essay, inquiry-based paper and study guide, for example). That’s nice to see, but the list of templates is a hodge-podge and could have been divided more neatly into business and college-level template folders. There also seems to be a number of templates that are focused on the needs of educators (vs. students) that I’m not sure really belong here.

The map collaboration capabilities of Webspiration Pro now include the ability to track who made what changes to your team map, as well as the ability to roll back changes to a previous version of the map. I also noticed that, in addition to downloading your mind map as an Inspiration document, you can choose options to download it as a Word document or transfer it to your Google Docs account. In particular, it’s nice to see the capability of moving your map from one cloud-based service (Webspiration) to another popular online document tool (Google Docs).

My only question is: Why was Webspiration in beta for 3 years? Normally, a program spends 3-6 months in beta, with a small group of testers. Inspiration Software says over 200,000 people participated in the Webspiration beta. To be fair, the application was launched just before the global economy went into the deepest recession in many years. The education market, which is Inspiration Software’s main focus, probably faced frozen budgets and limited spending on software for the last several years. Now that the global economy is starting to recover from the doldrums, it will be interesting to see where the developer takes this solid online tool. Will it become a leader in the online mapping space and continue to expand its palette of business-focused visual mapping tools? We’ll see.

Webspiration Pro is very affordable: subscriptions are US$39 per year (or $3.25 per month). No enterprise or volume pricing has been announced.

I said it in 2008 when I first saw Webspiration and I’ll say it again: This is a well-designed tool that is on par with the best web-based mind mapping tools, and is worthy of your attention. The cost is low enough that you can easily open an account and spend several months playing around with it to see if it meets the needs of you and your team.

You can learn more about Webspiration Pro on the application’s website.

A quick perusal of the Mindv work space reveals a well-designed application that is surprisingly full-featured. Most web-based mind mapping tools started out as fairly simple applications with basic functionality, then added more capabilities over time. But Mindv recently launched with a full complement of high-end features, including

• A ribbon toolbar, just like many of the desktop mind mapping programs available today.
• Support for multiple export and import formats
• Support for keyboard shortcuts (not common with web-based mind mapping apps, but a great productivity enhancer
• The ability to conduct Bing image searches from within the program and easily add them to your mind map (pictured above – click on the image to view a larger version)
• The ability to add audio and video clips to your maps
• The ability to add task data to map topics
• A variety of built-in map styles
• And much more

A free version of Mindv is available, which includes some advertising. Three levels of paid packages, with varying levels of functionality and online storage space are available, priced between US$3 and US$9.80 per month. For more details on these levels, please visit the Mindv features web page.

I’m very impressed with what I see so far. Watch for a full review of Mindv in the coming weeks.

During the last year, the number of web-based environments for collaborating around mind maps has grown significantly. In most cases, these are online environments created by developers of desktop mind mapping software, designed to enable their customers to share mind maps with their colleagues and team members easily, and to provide a web-based version of their software that people can use without having a licensed copy of the software on their desktop.

Here’s a summary of the major players in this mind map collaboration space:

Mindjet Catalyst: Catalyst enables sharing of mind maps and other documents in a collaborative, foldered environment. Team members can also use its built-in chat capabilities to carry on a discussion while working on a mind map. The application also contains a web-based version of MindManager, so your team members can share maps, even if not every team member has the desktop version of the program.

MindView Shared Workspace: This tool, recently introduced with the launch of MindView 4 several months ago, enables multi-user editing of mind maps, distribution of tasks to your team members and monitoring of task status via a series of web based dashboard reports. You can upload mind maps directly from the desktop version of MindView to Shared Workspace.

CS Odessa MindWave: This application started life as a mind mapping tool for the now-defunct Google Wave collaboration application. Since Google killed that tool, CS Odessa has relaunched it as a separate collaboration environment, complete with real-time collaboration and the ability to easily move maps from MindWave to your desktop copy of ConceptDraw MINDMAP. MindWave recently announced that MindWave is now available within SAP StreamWork, a cloud-based collaborative decision-making tool. Within StreamWork, MindWave functions like a gadget, in much the same way as it did inside of Google Wave.

iMindMap Online: Recently announced by ThinkBuzan, this new tool will offer a web-based version of its iMindMap mind mapping software, plus support for real-time collaboration on mind maps.

Several other software developers, including XMind, enable you to upload mind maps directly from their desktop mapping software to an online gallery, with the option to mark a map as unlisted or private – so you can share your maps with those people to whom you give the the URL, but they don’t appear in public listings of maps on the sites. But they don’t offer tools for online collaboration or co-editing of mind maps.

Still others, such as Mindomo and DropMind, developed web-based mind mapping applications and then launched desktop versions that are designed to integrate with each other.

As you can see, the mind mapping collaboration environment is really maturing and growing. If I have missed any tools or services, please note them in the comments section. Thanks!

In the process of creating this presentation, I learned a number of things about Prezi, both pro and con:

Pros

I laid out my main points in linear order in Notepad, and then used them as a guide to create a corresponding hierarchy of objects in the workspace. It was easy to add all of my text, arrange it how I wanted and then add images to it. It couldn’t be any simpler. Even the confusing looking “transformation zebra” – a set of striped, concentric circles that are used to control the rotation and size of objects in Prezi, turned out to be delightfully easy to use.

In general, Prezi was easy to use and intuitive to figure out. This is one of those apps you can just begin to use and figure it out as you go. For example, I learned how to re-order the path for your animated presentation just by playing around with Prezi. Turns out that in the middle of each path segment, there’s a circle that you can drag to an object to create a new node in your presentation. Another example: If you have created a frame around several objects, you can drag the path node to the border of the object; Prezi automatically centers the viewfinder on the frame and its contents.

Cons:

Prezi sometimes acted flaky. There’s a set of interlocking circles that float in the upper left corner of the workspace when you’re creating a prezi, which functions as the application’s toolbar. Sometimes this disappeared and I couldn’t figure out how to make it come back. So I’d have to log out and then log back in.

Text is only available in one color – black. Prezi does offer a number of templates, which apply a set of background colors, fonts and text colors to your prezi. That’s probably why you can’t change text color at will – because it would probably mess up these templates.

I discovered I had to be careful about the sizes of images I imported into the Prezi workspace. If they were too small, they appeared to be jaggy in my presentation. Case in point: The black and green logo for the Mind Mapping Insider program. I had to eliminate it, because I didn’t have the time to create a larger version.

I tried to create a list of 7 or 8 items, and then have Prezi zoom in on each one successfully – a technique that I had seen used in some other prezis. This took some effort, between sizing and positioning items properly, but it looked cool. Unfortunately, after I worked with this “zoom list” for a while, I got an error message from the application, telling me my file was too large. Apparently, whatever mathematical formulas Prezi uses to calculate the size and position of objects in the workspace didn’t like what I was trying to do. To fix this problem, I made all of the items in the list the same size, and just created a series of quarter-turn rotations to walk the viewer through my prezi. This comes up near the end of it.

Conclusion

So that’s what I learned. Prezi is a fascinating, easy to use tool that has a ton of promise, but is still slightly rough around the edges. If you’re looking for a multimedia tool that’s going to add some pizzazz to your blog or website, you can’t go wrong with Prezi.

It’s hard to explain what this browser-based application is and what it does. But it’s much easier to show it. Here is a prezi about mind mapping that someone shared in Prezi’s online gallery. It’s typical of a presentation created in this unique medium. To advance the presentation below, simply click on the right-facing arrow:

How it works

Prezi uses your content to create a story line, and then enables you and your audience to zoom in, zoom out and move through its elements in an amazing way. It enables you to show the bigger pictures and the details at the same time, on a single canvas. To create a prezi, you lay out the elements of your story – words, pictures and other elements – on the canvas; a “path” tool lets you select the order in which the presentation will “fly” through them.

In addition to presenting your ideas, Prezi can also be used for mind mapping, note taking and sharing information. Files created in Prezi can be embedded in a web page (as I’ve done above), published to social media sites, shared on a blog or posted to the Prezi “explore” library. This last resource, available by clicking on the “explore” tab at www.prezi.com, is an excellent way to see what others have created – and, by extension – what it’s possible to create with this powerful tool.

You can get started with a free Prezi account – a great way to explore this tool and whether or not it fits with your work style. It offers limited storage and places a Prezi watermark on each of the presentations you create. Still, it’s a good way to get started with it. A basic paid subscription to Prezi costs US$59 per year (less than $5 per month) and includes 500MB of online storage space. A Pro version is also available for a $159 annual fee that gives you four times as much storage, as well as access to a downloadable desktop version of Prezi.

Why is Prezi well suited to mind mapping?

Like conventional mind maps, Prezi enables you to see your information in chunks or elements, and to depict the relationships between them. It enables you to present multiple levels of detail, and even adds elements of space, movement and time to the information you need to capture or communicate. In addition, Prezi – like mind mapping – does an excellent job of supporting non-linear thinking, which is key to exploring a topic or idea in its myriad of details and possibilities. The unlimited canvas of this application facilitates letting your mind take your map where it wants to go. You can easily add images, web links and even multimedia files to presentations created in Prezi. Finally, like mind maps, Prezi helps your ideas to stand out and command attention.

An excellent guide to Prezi

A great guide to this Brave New World of visual thinking and presentation is Stephanie Diamond’s new book, Prezi for Dummies. I’ve known Stephanie for a number of years via my Mind Mapping Software Blog. She’s an incredibly smart person, an ardent user of mind maps for marketing, and I implicitly trust her judgment. If she says something is important, then you better pay attention. She has written a practical, fun-to-read guide to all things Prezi. Her breezy prose and numerous examples help to demystify this fascinating application, which requires you to throw out your existing presentation mindset and to rethink how you gather, arrange and present information and ideas.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a new way to present your ideas and explore how mind mapping works on this unique platform, why not sign up for a free basic Prezi account? You may also want to take a look at Stephanie’s book, which is an excellent “how-to” guide to this powerful and flexible tool.

MindWave enables teams to collaborate on a mind map that anyone can add to or edit, and which can be “played back” like any wave so that new participants can see how it was constructed. Mind maps can also be downloaded and developed further in the desktop version of ConceptDraw MINDMAP.

MindWave 2 improves the application’s functionality in a number of ways:

• It opens with a “getting started” map to introduce new users to its functionality, so they can begin collaborating on mind maps more quickly within Wave.
• A horizontal scroll bar makes it easier to work with mind maps that are wider than the right-hand pane in Google Wave. This is important, because MindWave doesn’t appear to have a zoom feature. In practice, however, I found this horizontal scroll bar to be so thin that it was hard to see. Plus, your map doesn’t “float” within the workspace the way it does in desktop- and web-based mind mapping software. You must scroll downward to the bottom border of the MindWave application, where the wave of discussion begins, to access this miniscule navigation control.
• Web addresses are automatically reformatted to URL links
• New keyboard shortcuts have been added

If you go to the MindWave page on the CS Odessa website, it provides full instructions on how to install this gadget. Best of all, Google Wave is no longer invitation, only, so anyone can try it out.

Judging from the buzz on Twitter during the last couple of months, a large number of people are intrigued by the idea of creating mind maps within Google Wave. It’s good to see that at least one developer of mind mapping software continues to push a head in this brave new world of collaboration. I’m still not sure I quite understand how to use Google Wave, but recognize that it is still a work in progress and will continue to evolve in the months ahead.