What do Smart Map Parts, Spinscape and the SharePoint version of MindManager have in common? They are all attempts to use mind maps as a research tool, connecting mind mapping software with data stores wherever they are – whether that data is on your corporate network, Google or your personal Evernote database – searching them and manipulating the resulting data within a visual map format.

The “information scalpel”

I predict that these tools will become more powerful and more flexible over time, an “information scalpel” that will enable sophisticated searching of information stores and flexible manipulation of the results. Some possibilities include:

• Boolean searches (search for A and B but not C),
• Limiting searches say to a specific kind of data, such as news or blogs,
• Searching other online stores of information, such as Wikipedia, Google+, Wolfram Alpha and industrial directories
• Connections to other types of corporate databases, in addition to SharePoint
• A Smart Map Part builder, so you can easily construct and modify tools to search those information stores that are most important in your industry or profession
• Storing and auto-updating search results on a scheduled basis, which would be useful for topic monitoring and competitive analysis
• Auto-notification when search results are located that meet certain criteria
• Tagging specific topics and search results and forwarding them to others on your work team for action

In addition, the ability to review search results and only add certain entries to your mind map is a capability that will become more important in the near future. Currently, Mindjet’s Smart Map Parts for Mind Manager deliver all search results into your mind map. It’s up to you to delete those that aren’t relevant to your needs. A better approach would be to conduct searches and load the results into a side panel or dialog box near the work space, where the user can decide which results are relevant and worthy of being added to your map. This is the approach taken by Spinscape, a web-based mind mapping application, and I think it makes a lot of sense. This kind of functionality will becoming increasingly important, as information managers continue to struggle with information overload.

The integrated browser with the ability to drag and drop web content also helps to transform mind mapping software into a powerful research tool. It enables you to search for information of interest and selectively add the most important bits and pieces to your mind map in an organized and efficient way.

What inspired me

What got me thinking about this is Radian6, a sophisticated team-based social media monitoring and campaign development tool that enables multiple people to track what’s being said about your company and its competitors, to monitor the needs that are being expressed by current and prospective customers and to take action. This powerful toolset is an information dashboard on steroids. As I looked at what Radian6 can do for organizations, I got to wondering what it would look like within a mind map environment.

Salesforce.com recently acquired Radian6. I think in the future we can expect to see some integration between MindManager and this powerful social media toolset, because Mindjet already has a smart map connector called Deal Navigator for the popular online CRM application.

That’s what I see in my crystal ball. What do you think the future of mind mapping software looks like?

In a recent phone conversation, Mark Salamango from Spinscape shared with me two stories about his his firm and his web-based mapping/information discovery tool is already moving in that direction. In one case, 47 people were collaborating on a single map at the same time! I was so intrigued that I asked him to send me brief write-ups of both stories to share with you:

Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) “is the world’s largest organization devoted exclusively to advancing unmanned systems.” The group sponsored a conference on June 22-24, and Spinscape attended to help facilitate the panel discussions and breakout sessions.

The goal of the conference was to get 200 of the brightest minds in the growing field of unmanned systems all together in one place to discuss the future of ground robotics.  The work product was a white paper that was going straight up the chain to the White House.

Several Spinscape product specialists sat in on the conference panels and captured information while discussions took place. Two large projectors provided a view of the mind maps to the attendees. Others with laptops were able to view and collaborate as the discussion progressed. At any given time, five to ten people were adding topics and information to the maps. Spinscape’s node-level security meant that conference organizers could easily give just a handful of key people access to the full map; attendees were given write access to other parts of the map (meaning they could add topics), while some sections were read-only.

On the final day, the group met to go over action items and to confirm that the document structure was sound. After the conference, attendees were given access to the mind maps so they could continue to collaborate in areas of their specific expertise. In several weeks, the map will be exported to a document, it will undergo final proofreading and OPSEC (operations security) approval and it will be sent to all participants.

The beauty of this process was that the mind map was easily organized and ideas were easily captured and viewed in a graphical way. Attendees could focus on brainstorming, structure, and content rather than taking notes.  They also know that their data is safe, can be exported, and is now a “living, breathing, entity” that will continue to evolve.

World Cup soccer tournament

The Spinscape team caught a little bit of World Cup fever this year and decided it was time to create a map of all the countries in the World Cup this year.  The goal (no pun intended) was to get as many people as possible adding information about World Cup teams at the same time.  The result was quite cool.  At one point there were 47 people working on the same map at the same time. The number of nodes on the map fluctuated quite a bit, but was up close to 800 at one point in time. This map was much more exciting than many of the games this year. Next: A map of the Tour de France!

What’s significant about these stories?

I believe that, longer term, applications like Spinscape could potentially become a new flavor of crowdsourcing tool, enabling large numbers of people to contribute ideas to a single map and to build upon the ideas of others. At the very least, I believe more robust mind mapping tools will enable larger teams to contribute to visual maps, with granular controls over who can view, edit, add topics and other access rights. The future for collaboration using this technology looks very bright indeed

Here’s what’s notable in Spinscape 2.0:

New map management panel: When you first open Spinscape 2.0, you’re greeted with a  robust map management panel, which enables you to create a new map based on several templates, view and access your recent maps, and even create a hierarchy of expandable/contractible folders to manage your maps. This is also where you can access any maps created by others that you have the rights to share.

The container metaphor: In Spinscape 2.0, each node in the map represents a container, in which you can place many types of assets. Carrying the container metaphor even further, each node has what the developer calls a “lid” – a set of tabs that appears below a topic when you click on it to make it the active node of the map. This nested set of dialog boxes contains tabs for notes, videos, links, file attachments, discussions or task information. The implementation of this multi-functional asset bar is very slick. You can enter your content directly in the lid, or in a status bar at the top of the workspace that also has a corresponding set of tabs. You can “pin” open this lid to keep it always visible; otherwise it disappears from view when you click somewhere else in the map. This helps to keep visual clutter to a minimum in your Spinscape 2.0 mind maps.

At  the bottom of the lid is the word “dock” with arrows on either side of it. If you click on one of them, the currently open tab will “detach” from the topic and dock itself to that side of the workspace. At this point, it becomes a resizable window – nice! This comes in useful if you’re writing and want to keep the notes tabs of several key topics open to capture your random ideas. I love the concept of a detachable notes area. Very cool!

Good use of screen real estate: As you collapse branches of your map, the rest of the topics reposition themselves to minimize the amount of white space on the screen. This helps to ensure that you can see more of your map’s content within the workspace. Zooming is accomplished using a mouse scroll wheel or a two-fingered gesture on Mac laptops. Product manager Mark Salamango explained that Spinscape 2.0 was designed with gestures in mind because of the growing popularity of mobile computing devices like the soon-to-be-introduced Apple iPad. Tabbed palettes on either side of the workspace give you access to a wealth of options for customizing your maps, while also making very efficient use of space.

Improved plug-in system: Here’s where Spinscape 2.0 gets exciting. The first version of this web-based application introduced the world to the concept of auto-discovering information from the web and pulling it into your mind maps, but version 2.0 has taken this capability to the next level. It currently offers plug-ins for Google, Google Docs, Wikipedia, Amazon S3 and ESV Bible searches.

If you select the Wikipedia plug-in, type a keyword and click the search icon, Spinscape searches the online encyclopedia and displays a results summary in the plug-ins window. You have three ways you can add this content to your map, designated by a trio of icons at the bottom of the search results window: add to the current node, add to a new node, or add full content. If you select “add full content,” Spinscape uses the Wikipedia listing’s headings and sub-headings to parse the text into a series of subtopics. If you click on the notes tab in the lid of one of those subtopics, you’ll discover that Spinscape has inserted the full text of that section of the Wikipedia entry as a note. Very slick!

Another example: If you conduct a Google search, the results window displays links to narrow your search to the web, videos, images or blogs. Selecting the video link, the results window is repopulated with video results for your keyword. Next, you have the option of adding the video to a new node or to the current node. Regardless of which one you choose, the video becomes the node, and can be played in place within your Spinscape map. In addition, this “video node” has a lid – just like a normal topic – so you can add notes, tags, links and other meta data to it. Very cool! As you play with this application’s powerful search capabilities, you realize that this is what it means to leverage the full power of mind mapping as a research tool!

Salamango says his team has released a new API (application programming interface) for Spinscape 2.0 that will make it possible for developers to easily write plug-ins for it. You will be able to submit plug-ins to a centralized gallery, and will be able to designate them as public (anyone can use them) or private (only you can use them, or you may sell them). These plug-ins will be available from a plug-in gallery within the Spinscape interface. Salamango said he has even written a plugin to help developers build plugins faster and easier!

I noticed that Spinscape 2.0 didn’t seem to have any social media plug-ins, so I asked Salamango about that. He said his development team has a number of social media plug-ins under development that should be released shortly.

Flexible sharing options: Sharing was enabled in the first version of Spinscape, but it wasn’t very easy to use. The BossDev team solved that problem in version 2.0 by creating a simple sharing “wizard” that enables you to easily designate:

• What you want to share – an entire map, a section of it or individual nodes
• Who you want to share it with – individuals or groups in your Spinscape contacts – or send an e-mail message to people not in your list of contacts
• How you want to share it – read only, read/write

You can assign, change and remove these permissions at any time. To the best of my knowledge, Spinscape is the first mind mapping tool to ever take sharing down to the node level.

If a node is designated as not shared, it’s not visible to your collaborators. If a node is sharable, it is designated by a small square with an “S” in it in the upper right corner of each map node. If you aren’t sharing maps and want to reduce visual clutter in your Spinscape workspace, you can turn off these sharing indicators in the application’s settings menu.

Real-time collaboration: Spinscape 2.0 does a great job of enabling real-time collaboration; small tool tip pop-ups show you who has added content or edited nodes in  the shared map; node-level locking ensures that two people can’t edit the same node at the same time. Collaboration is supported via a very elegantly implemented chat feature. The developers of Spinscape wisely made it look and feel like the chat function in Facebook, which means it will immediately be familiar and intuitive to many users. As you would expect, you can export your chat history into a note.

Tagging and filtering: Spinscape 2.0 enables you to tag the nodes of your mind map; this enables you to filter its contents based upon the tags you have defined. You can also drag and drop tags onto your contacts to create groups and set up sharing rights for them.

Farmland view: Sometimes a traditional mind map view is useful, but other times it’s not. That’s why Spinscape 2.0 includes a new “farmland view” – so called because it converts your map’s nodes into a patchwork quilt of rectangular shapes (see image at right; click on it for a larger version). When you mouse over a topic in this view, its color changes to yellow, along with all of its child topics. This shows you what’s related to the topic that you’re hovering over. It gets even better if you double-click on a topic. This zooms you one level deeper into your map’s contents, still in the farmland view. It’s a unique and potentially powerful way to do visual data mining, accoding to Salamango. He says that farmland view is the first of a number of alternative ways of visualizing your data that will be supported in Spinscape during the coming months.

Presentation mode: I love the way Spinscape 2.0′s new presentation mode has been implemented. It enables you to create and manipulate a series of screenshot “views” of your map. The views you’ve captured are displayed in a horizontal “filmstrip” at the top of the application’s workspace; you can drag and drop them to adjust their order. This gives you a very fine level of control over what gets shown in each “slide” of your presentation. When you play your presentation, Spinscape automatically animates the transitions between each state – very slick! What’s even cooler is you can combine Spinscape’s presentation mode with its powerful and flexible sharing capabilities to invite others to view your presentation. That person or people get to view your screen, sort of like a “GoToMeeting Light,” as Salamango describes it.

An iPhone version of Spinscape is now available: Along with the launch of the new version of the web application, the developer has also recently released an iPhone version of Spinscape, which works seamlessly with its big brother. However, it doesn’t inherit the web application’s visual interface. Because of the small screen, Spinscape for the iPhone utilizes an outline format to enable you to navigate through the levels of your mind map, while retaining the nested tab “lid” for viewing any attached assets.

This is only a partial listing of what’s new in Spinscape 2.0; there’s even more that I don’t have the room or the time to describe here. All I can say is get yourself an account and take this powerful mind mapping application for a “spin” (pun intended). I’m confident you will be impressed. The cost is US$9.99 per month, or $100 per year – a bargain, in my opinion.

Conclusion

Spinscape 2.0 illuminates the future of mind mapping. It not only enables you to easily find, organize and share a variety of content assets, but is also seamlessly connected with all of the rich resources that the web has to offer. This makes it an incredible research tool for just about any business professional, student or clergyperson. Spinscape 2.0 is powerful, easy to use and incredibly flexible. Plus, with a developer API, it will become even more useful in the months ahead, as the developer community begins to write and share new plug-ins for it.

Spinscape

I haven’t played with Spinscape since I reviewed it in March, so I was quite curious to see how it has evolved. The user interface shows a number of signs of refinement. The plug-in toolbar has been relocated to a vertical toolbar on the right side of the workspace, and enables you to search Google and Wikipedia, as well as their personal collections of documents and data stored on Google Documents, Delicious and Amazon S3. Search results are displayed in a pop-up pane on the right side of the workspace. Contacts, with whom you can collaborate on Spinscape maps, are displayed in a vertical panel on the left side of the workspace.

I realize that Spinscape has just entered public beta, and is still very much a work in progress. But I think it suffers from some significant usability problems, even at the most basic level. Here are some things that I found less than intuitive with the current iteration of Spinscape:

Moving topics/nodes: This is more difficult than it needs to be. If you move a parent topic around the workspace, its child topics don’t move with it. This means you need to drag and drop each child topic to the vicinity of its parent.

Renaming nodes: If you’re zoomed out on your map, to the point where you cannot read the names of each map node, if you decide to rename one, its text isn’t readable. You would think that a dialog box would pop up, where the text is displayed at a readable font size. But that doesn’t happen.

Viewing the properties of nodes: Unlike most mind mapping programs, which give you a lot of visual feedback on what’s attached to a topic (notes, links, files, etc.), Spinscape doesn’t do this. You must open the node editor in order to tell what’s attached to a node.

The node editor: This is a dialog box that enables you to annotate a node with notes, attach a file or web link, and add your own descriptions to them. If a node has been created from the results of a web search, it already contains an excerpt of the search results description. Unfortunately, this isn’t very helpful; in many cases, you will need to add your own annotations to nodes to make their contents understandable. One more thing: Coming back to Spinscape after an absence of more than 3 months, I was initially confused by the node editor. I couldn’t figure out how to add or edit links, for example. So I watched a tutorial, and discovered that the buttons that surround the nodes editor do this. Unfortunately, they are muted in color, and tend to blend in with the background of the workspace. Also, they are arranged outside of the node editor box (which has a white background, and the workspace background is black or dark gray), so they don’t appear to be a part of it. Ideally, a program or web service ought to be usable without any instruction; developers frequently use tooltips and other methods to give users “hints” about what they can do. But I found the nodes editor to be absent of such helpful messages. Maybe other people won’t get stuck on this, but as I said, I found it to be initially confusing.

Collapsing child topics: This is basic functionality, which even the most rudimentary mind mapping software can do. So why is it so hard in Spinscape? To collapse child topics, you have to drag each one individually over the parent topic, which then displays a “plus” sign to indicate that there is more content nested within it. If you have a large number of child topics, you’re going to be busy for a while, dragging and dropping them. Why not just provide a little icon on the parent topic that, when clicked, automatically collapses all of the child topics?

Google Docs & Spreadsheets: This plug-in worked very quickly to return search results from my Google Docs account. But I found the options for adding content from them to Spinscape to be confusing. Each search result says “Add to Spinscape Map Node.” I clicked on the “Map” link, and the application added a node with a link to that document. However, when I clicked on “Node,” nothing seemed to happen…

One final note: If you want to see what the current state of Spinscape is, but don’t want to sign up for a beta test account right now, then I recommend that you view the tutorials .