You might remember that about 6 weeks ago we did a user survey, asking you MindMeisters about use cases of mind mapping, brainstorming, and planning with MindMeister. We wanted to know what you’re doing with it, what new features you’d like us to add etc. We received tons of response which is greatly appreciated - just over 1,800 filled out the four page questionnaire and helped us understand their needs and get a better idea of the road ahead.

We’ve now managed to put together some of the results here. Please check out the chart widget below and feel free to interpret the results, letting us know what you think.

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As promised here is the more verbose version of the most recent update of MindMeister. Release 3 contains lots of enhancements to the ease of use and overall consistency of MindMeister, plus some bigger feature blocks. Two important things we just didn’t get done in time though - inline images and connections between ideas. They’re in the making though, expect them before Christmas!

Find some key new features below, or see a comprehensive list in the What’s New in MindMeister 3.0 mind map.

Well, we hope you benefit from all the work that is put into MindMeister. We strive to make the best online mind mapping experience available and welcome all your feedback on the new stuff.

Our development team worked hard these last few days to iron our the last glitches in our new release. The dust has settled now, although there’s still some fine tuning to be done before we feel confident enough to send out the release newsletter.

However, to give you a brief overview on what’s new already now we’ve created a mind map (surprise, surprise) with some advance info on the new stuff: What’s New in MindMeister 3.0.

A more verbose portrayal will follow here soon.

Please note that we will conduct a major upgrade on Friday October 31 between 20:00 (UTC) and 22:00 (UTC) and on Sunday November 2 between 20:00 (UTC) and 2008-11-3 02:00 (UTC). To figure out when we are offline in your time zone please consult timeanddate.com.

Please avoid taking your maps offline with Google Gears this time as we also upgrade MindMeister’s offline capabilities.

While the downtime is currently scheduled for the time slots above, it might take longer as we also move to new hardware but we will do our best to bring MindMeister back asap. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused and hope you’ll like the new features in the upcoming version of MindMeister.

Update: As you will have seen we’re online again with the new version. We’re still fighting with some setup issues that might result in hanging requests here or there. We hope to have these sorted out soon and will then let you know abou the new features!

Update 2: We still have some load balancing issues with the new server environment (which in theory should be much faster than the old one!) so the site is very slow at times. We’ll upgrade some software and will probably have some short downtimes today (Tuesday Nov 4). Please bear with us.

Please note that we will conduct a major upgrade on Friday October 31 between 20:00 (UTC) and 22:00 (UTC) and on Sunday November 2 between 20:00 (UTC) and 2008-11-3 02:00 (UTC). To figure out when we are offline in your time zone please consult timeanddate.com.

Please avoid taking your maps offline with Google Gears this time as we also upgrade MindMeister’s offline capabilities.

While the downtime is currently scheduled for the time slots above, it might take longer as we also move to new hardware but we will do our best to bring MindMeister back asap. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused and hope you’ll like the new features in the upcoming version of MindMeister.

Update: As you will have seen we’re online again with the new version. We’re still fighting with some setup issues that might result in hanging requests here or there. We hope to have these sorted out soon and will then let you know abou the new features!

Update 2: We still have some load balancing issues with the new server environment (which in theory should be much faster than the old one!) so the site is very slow at times. We’ll upgrade some software and will probably have some short downtimes today (Tuesday Nov 4). Please bear with us.

It’s just a matter of a few days now before we will release the all new MindMeister. We know it’s been a long time in the making and that’s why we’d like to give you a sneak peek at one of the new things now: the new History View.

More than with standard documents, the evolution of a mind map - especially a collaborative one - tells an interesting story, which deserves a proper visualization. We weren’t content with how the revision history of a mind map was displayed in MindMeister up to now, so we came up with something new, and, we hope you’ll agree, much better.

Try the short screencast below to see how this works now. And please let us know what you think.

MindMeister's History View

We just closed our survey yesterday. Thanks a lot for participating. We had an overwhelming response both in terms of numbers and quantitative and qualitative input. We received 1,813 responses and lots of ideas on how to improve MindMeister and position it  successfully as a premier mind mapping application.
It’ll take some time to analyze all the results but we’ll keep you posted on our findings, and publish whatever we think may be interesting to the greater public.

In the meantime we also selected the lucky five winners of the Threadless vouchers and sent out the gift certificates - congratulations!

We’ve received word about a new, highly inspiring mind mapping competition. The World Mind Network, and its affiliate Friends Beyond Borders, are offering a US$ 5000 prize for the best Collaborative Mind Map addressing the problem of world poverty.

We think this is a great idea, and we’d love to see one of our users win this competition and contribute towards a solution to this immense issue. To take part in the competition, just create a new map, share it with your friends and colleagues (or publish it to your blog) and put together some ideas addressing the issue. When you’re done, tag the map with worldpoverty and publish it on MindMeister. We’ll take care of everything else.

Make sure that when you’re thinking about the issue, you try to direct your mind towards positive thoughts, such as world affluence rather than world poverty. We don’t want to send too much negative energy out into the world.

For details on the competition, see the press release on Scribd.

We just published our first user survey. We believe that MindMeister is well so received because we somehow managed to hit a nerve at a certain point in time. To further refine and improve the service, however, we need the input of our community of MindMeisters.
The survey takes about 5 minutes to complete and aims to find out what our users do with MindMeister, how they benefit from it, what we can do better and what is missing completely.

Please click here to access the survey

For your input you’ll get a much better product incorporating your ideas, plus the chance to win 5 gift certificates for threadless.com T-shirts at a value of US$ 100 each! The winner will be selected by a raffle draw, not by how nice your survey responses are ;-).

We are cooperating with several players in the web-based productivity and Office 2.0 field to evangelize the concept of web-based mind mapping. After all we’re eager to provide you with a tool that makes your (work) life easier.

This time round we partnered with a conference organizer in the UK. MindMeister users get a special deal for the Unicom Web 2.0 Conference taking place in London on October 1-2, 2008, with a preceding workshop on September 30. If you’re a Premium MindMeister you automatically qualify for a promotional discount of 30% off the regular conference price and 50% off the regular workshop price.

If you happen to be in the area and are interested in going, just register online and select MMPU from the “Please can you tell us how you heard about UNICOM” dropdown list to get your discount!

Let’s make it three. I’m shifting gears to head up north to Berlin to present at Railsconf Europe. While the others stay on the shiny surface I dig deep into the inner workings of web apps.

I will show off not only MindMeister’s offline capabilities but will compare Google Gears‘ concept with Adobe AIR. The title of my talk is: Offline Rails Applications with Google Gears and Adobe AIR

I’ll also bring a pack of Premium account coupons with me. So if you’re at the conference, please do step forward, shake hands, and upgrade to premium MindMeister!

While Thomas gets to travel to the beautiful Bay Area, I will have to make do with the - of course no less beautiful - city of Graz, Austria. From September 3-5 MindMeister will be exhibiting at the Triple-I Conference, formerly known as I-Know. I will also be giving a talk about the story of MindMeister in the Enterprise 2.0 track of the sessions, titled How to market a Web 2.0 product in an SaaS context (PDF). Of course I’ll be posting the slides to Slideshare too, afterwards.

MindMeister is also a sponsor of the conference, and every attendee gets a coupon with a free Premium license. You can redeem the license against a new Premium account for one year, or extend your existing subscription by a year. Worth $50. Nice, eh?

If you happen to be in the general Graz area next week, do drop by and get a sneak peek at the upcoming release of MindMeister…

Fall is drawing near, the leaves are turning yellow and IT conferences are springing from the ground like mushrooms. Time for us MeisterWorkers to get back on the road, partly attending conferences, partly speaking at them. First up is the brilliant Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, organized for the third time by the equally brilliant Ismael Ghalimi.

As one of my first “outdoor” commitments for MindMeister I’ll be going to the show this year, looking to hear lots of interesting Enterprise 2.0 talk and meet folks from the industry. As you might have read on the Office 2.0 blog, MindMeister is a bronze sponsor at the conference and we’re giving away free Premium licenses for one year for all attendees. Now, if that’s not enough of an incentive to register for Office 2.0 right away!

If you want to hook up while I’m in San Francisco please get in touch, I’m more than happy to discuss all things MindMeister with you.

Hi guys. I almost forgot to introduce myself. I’m Thomas (or Thomas N. Burg unzipped) Marketing Manager aboard MindMeister as of August 1. Since we are a pretty young startup you can imagine that my tasks are colorful and my outputs manifold. In any case I’m absolutely thrilled to be here (whispering: as one of the first paying users I was finally insourced ;-) to help growing our business.

Please step forward if you have anything that might help us to achieve exactly that.

Short bio: I spent the last 14 years with and on the web, providing education, products and services and even conferences only to infuse all that experience into MindMeister - if you care for more details please refer to http://resume.burg.cx.

Additionally you can follow me on Twitter.

Some of you might have heard about Twitter’s announcement to terminate SMS-services outside of USA, Canada, and India.

Why does this matter for MindMeister users? We adopted Twitter’s API as a way to notify you via SMS of updates to your mind maps. Our thanks go to Twitter for allowing us to deploy this service quickly. However, it looks like the SMS features will go away the moment Twitter ends this service.

But don’t panic, you still will get notified of map changes via Twitter or email. It’s only the SMS forwarding that’s missing.
And as long as you are in Twitter supported countries - and they are working to get more and more operators to cooperate - this will continue to work.

We are already thinking about alternative ways to support SMS notifications, though as you can read - even for well funded firms like Twitter - paying the SMS bills is quite something. So if you have any ideas how to support SMS notifications please share them with us!

We currently seem to be experiencing some issues with our provider, resulting in proxy errors for our users. We are in contact with the technical staff and hope to have solved the issues soon - please bear with us!

MindMeister is growing fast and we need your help in our quest to conquer the world of online mind mapping! We’re looking to hire enthusiastic people who are keen to work in a young and creative team developing and selling awesome products in a dynamic and fast-growing market.

Current open positions are:

Online Marketing Specialist

Sales / Channel Manager

Web 2.0 Internship

Frontend Web Developer (JS / Ajax)

If your profile matches any of these and you’re interested in becoming a MeisterWerker and enjoy the perks of working in a promising web startup (including life-long Premium membership to MindMeister ;-)) please check out our jobs page and send us your application!

We’ll be having a short downtime on MindMeister on Sunday, May 25, 8am GMT for about two hours. We’ve scheduled so that hopefully very few people are affected. Please try and export any maps you might need during this time in advance. Thanks for your understanding!

After nominating us as finalists of their Europe 100 Award the folks at Red Herring have now selected MindMeister as one of the winners of their rather prestigious prize. Thanks guys!

The list of 200 finalists was whittled down to 100 winners (yes this means every second nominee won - so what?) at the award ceremony in Malta and Till - picking the longer straw again - was there to collect our shiny wood framed award plaque.

This is our third award in eight months and we’re in serious danger of becoming very big-headed. On the other hand we know awards are one thing, but the real indicator of the value of MindMeister is the feedback of our users - so keep those feature requests and ideas coming, and us busy!

We appreciate the new release has been a long time in the making - but it’s here now! Last week we’ve deployed a new version of our mind mapping tool, which we’ve boastingly dubbed MindMeister 2.0.

Our users often tell us that they like MindMeister because of its intuitive interface and overall simplicity. That’s why we try to add only the most necessary features in new releases - and still, this time it turned out to be quite a long list

Oh, and don’t fret if you can’t find your pet feature below, in spite of all the talk about simplicity some more updates are coming soon!

Task information on ideasAs a first step to lightweight project management in MindMeister you can now add task information - priority, completion, due date and owner - to ideas. More to come! Attachments on ideasYou can now upload file attachments to ideas and preview images through inline thumbnails. This feature is for Premium users only, but everybody can try it out for 30 days. WunderLink and WunderNoteTry out these new functions to magically add links and notes to your ideas, using the wonders of the web. WunderLink gets its link from a little Yahoo! search performed in the background, while WunderNote uses a FreeBase database lookup. Automatic text wrapsIdea captions will now automatically wrap at a certain length to avoid overlong nodes (you can keep the old behaviour by adding manual line breaks with Shift-RETURN) More Geistesblitz featuresIn our constant quest to improve the Geistesblitz tools we have now added email support and a Geistesblitz Activity for Internet Explorer 8. With email support, you can send single Geistesblitzes or while mind maps just through an email. Subsharing for mapsNew option to allow collaborators to invite others when sharing a map - this will also work for already shared maps Print and export enhancementsNew option to center map on printout, PDF export of mind map now includes notes Formatting and navigationApply text styles selectively to child ideas, nicer formatting of first level branches, ability to expand and collapse levels Notes and linksAdvanced and larger note editor with more formatting options, new links widget in sidebar, “Show popular links” for idea OpenID and Paypal supportSupport for signup and login through OpenIDs and Paypal support when upgrading to commercial licenses. Other enhancementsNicer invitation and sharing emails, new user options, improved support for Safari and Opera, performance improvements through better script and image loading.

Due to a rather large server update we’ll be having a scheduled downtime on MindMeister from Friday, April 11, 7pm GMT for about two hours. Please try and export any maps you might need during this time in advance and try and enjoy a mind mapping free Friday afternoon / night ;-). Thanks for your understanding!

The God of Awards has been good to us these last few weeks - just before the Easter break we were informed that MindMeister has been shortlisted for the Red Herring 100 Europe 2008 - an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA region each year. Thanks very much guys!

Apparently we’re one of 200 finalists for that award, and the 100 lucky winners will be announced at the Red Herring Europe 2008 event scheduled for April 14-16 on the beautiful Mediterranean island of Malta.

Red Herring say their editorial staff “rigorously evaluated several hundred private companies through a careful analysis of financial data and subjective criteria, including quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development”. In any case, we’re in pretty good company, as past winners include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube (and before winning they must have been finalists too, right?).

Keen readers can check out the official press release (this time in English - yay!).

It’s been a good week - great weather, more user registrations than ever before, and finally the news that MindMeister has won the Innovation Award 2008 of the german SMB Initiative in the category “Web 2.0″!

MindMeister was selected from over 1600 submitted tools and sites and they said we should be duly proud (well, we are!). The prize is awarded to software tools especially suited for use in small and medium businesses.

So my colleague Till just came back from CeBIT in Hannover where the prize was awarded and the glass trophy fits snugly beside last year’s design award. Your first award is always special of course, but when they give you a second one you know it wasn’t just a fluke! We’ll take this as an incentive to keep working hard on our online mind mapping tool and improve it for all our users in releases to come.

See some pictures of the award ceremony or read the official press release (german only, I’m sorry guys…).

We’re pleased to announce the successful integration of MindMeister into atoolo, a new online desktop application that is currently in open beta. Using the MindMeister Embed API, the integration allows atoolo users to access and edit their MindMeister maps directly from within the atoolo webtop, optionally saving maps to their built-in atoolo disk.

Besides providing 1 GB of free storage space for every account, atoolo also enables users to work on documents directly in the browser, without the need for a native application. Which made MindMeister a pretty good fit, of course. There are also all the other usual office-type documents such as word processing and spreadsheets (powered by Zoho) as well as project support, instant messaging and a YouTube integration - check it out at www.atoolo.com!

If you also want to embed MindMeister in your application just go and register your API key at http://www.mindmeister.com/services/api

Time flies - so much that we missed the 1 year anniversary of MindMeister just a few days ago on February 7! Yes, it was just one year ago that MindMeister went into private beta to about 200 users, which very quickly became 2,000 through many many invitations. Admittedly, we really only went “live” on May 1st, so we have an excuse for another anniversary celebration in a few months time!

Since the private beta lots of features have been added, and also the interface has undergone a few revisions - albeit minor ones (it just looked good right away ;-)). Since the start of development, however, the design of the user interface has changed quite a bit - and luckily so, as you can see from the image above, showing the evolution of the map view in the early stages of implementation…

Not too long ago we launched the Geistesblitz Tools - widgets for Mac OS Dashboard and Windows Vista for quickly inserting ideas into a MindMeister mind map - and received lots of great feedback. However, we also received some not so good feedback from users of older Windows versions who found themselves not being able to use these gadgets…

So, we’ve taken that feedback very seriously and now are proud to give you not one, not two - but three new versions of Geistesblitz, for Yahoo! Widgets, iGoogle and the iPhone. We hope this will make everybody happy! (if you’ve never heard of the Geistesblitz tools before you can check them out here first)

	Geistesblitz Yahoo! Widget Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator) is the most common widget engine out there and works on all recent Windows versions, as well as Mac OS. So we thought it only fair to support this as well! System Requirements: Windows 2000/XP/Vista or Mac OS X Download Now!
	Geistesblitz iGoogle Gadget For those of you who already live and breathe through the web browser, the Geistesblitz gadget for iGoogle is the weapon of choice - one click to add the gadget to your iGoogle page and fire off ideas to MindMeister straight from your web portal! Browser Requirements: MSIE 6+, Firefox, Safari, Opera Install Now!
	Geistesblitz iPhone Gadget With 4 million phones sold within half a year, developing for the iPhone recently became more than a fashion statement. While you’ll have to wait a little longer for the full iPhone interface, here’s a cheeky gadget for your iPhone browser as a little taster! System Requirements: Apple iPhone or iPod Touch Install Now!

Season’s Greetings to all MindMeisters around the world and thank you all for using our application, your generous praise, and constructive feedback over the last 10 months - it’s been a very interesting year for us and we’re all looking forward to a short break before kicking off the next year with a string of new features and ideas!

If you (like me) are late getting Christmas presents, and really have no better idea, you might want to sponsor a MindMeister Premium membership for somebody - we’ll even refund you 20% of the price on your credit card if you do this by 7th January 2008!

Well, that’s enough of the hard sell for this year, once again Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to everybody!

We’ve so far only talked about the new Offline feature with Google Gears that we launched with the latest release. And while most of the energy went into that, we also added some other new features and enhancements. Here’s a short list:

Passwords for public maps You can now set passwords for public maps for secure linking and embedding and to hide them from the public maps list Blog embedding for everybody Now you don’t need to be Premium user anymore to embed maps into websites or blogs Embed API A new embed API allows you to seamlessly integrate our map editor in virtually any other web application Improved performance Vastly reduced the number of requests when loading a map by combining icons and other tuning measures Reseller Scheme If you’re interested in reselling MindMeister to other users just sign up for an account here and get 20% on every license sold! Other enhancements Easy enable notifications when first sharing a map - tag auto completion - reworked publish dialog with easy copy buttons - view invoices and export as PDF - and many more…

Right now we’re working on a few fixes to some editing problems that some people have been having, as well as on a number of new features. They are things that have been requested frequently and that we think we need to complete our mind mapping offering, such as attachments and images, connections between nodes, possibly some project management things (e.g. task info) as well as Geistesblitz enhancements.