Thinking Outside the Bubble

What do all great websites have in common? They all start from great ideas. Great ideas come from collaborative brainstorming. Mark Zuckerburg may have come up with the foundation for Facebook, but he needed a collaborative team effort to develop the wide array of features on the world’s largest social network site. Now with bubbl.us you can organize your great ideas and send them back and forth between colleagues to turn a good idea into a fully developed great idea. There are even mind-mapping apps for smartphones where you can jot down the beginnings of a plan on the go, save it to the “cloud” and access it later from a PC when you have time to flesh out your plan.

On the surface, bubbl.us looks like something you used to do in grade school: brainstorming with word bubbles. Bubbl.us takes this concept to the next level with the ability to save, share, and access it from the “cloud”. The “cloud” is a fairly new term that you will be hearing much more about in the future. In the past, most of our software and files had to be stored locally, that is on your hard drive or on a disc. Now, as long as you have internet access, you can access you files and other accounts of software through the “cloud”. Increasingly, this means not just PC’s but smartphones, tablets, or even gaming consoles.

When organizing my thoughts on how I would even write a blog post about mind-mapping, I used bubbl.us to put my thoughts into motion. Its easy user interface is as simple as pressing tab or enter to branch out a new word bubble, so you can whip one of these mind-maps faster online than on paper. Did I mention that the bubbles can contains more than just words but even an embedded image, video, or hyperlink? This is where I really start to see the endless capabilities of these mind-maps.

So this is just an introduction to this burgeoning software, but I encourage you try it out for yourself. It’s easy and free to register; some sites don’t even require you to register. If you really want to get fancy, there are services that allow you to subscribe for more capabilities. With its intuitive user interface, you will be mind-mapping in no time!