Mind Map Library News

Its hard to believe but its been a month since official Mappio launch. It was a great month, we got coverage on all major mind mapping blogs and traffic went up to 400-500 daily visitors.

We got 11 blog posts with 30+ links and 200+ mind maps uploaded for our Mappio Launch Contest

The winning entry is Creative Organization mind map by Jamie Nast. I sent my congratulations to Jamie and hope she will keep using Mappio.

Thanks everyone for participating. I will have another similar contest soon, so stay in touch.

Yesterday I had my first take down notice for a MindManager map uploaded to Mappio - MindMapping library. Request was sent by Yahoo MindManager group moderator and I guess that complain was logged by one of the Yahoo group users. These messages are not visible anymore on the post list, I guess moderator removed them.

If anybody cares - the MindMap in question was originally published here
http://www.rogercavanagh.com/helpinfo/pprgb/index.html

I could not verify the map ownership (and I really did not want to spend any time on that). So I just took it down and replied to moderator.

Looking at the recently uploaded mindmaps I get 4-5 uploads a day. Tiny number… I think I can deal with take down notices by hand for a while.

But this process raised few interesting questions for me:

• When you put a download link to your MindMap online - do you automatically assume Creative Commons license?
• Is there any way to sign MindManager or FreeMind maps?

To celebrate Mappio launch we are going to have a sweepstake for our new users. During next 4 weeks (from December 14, 2007 to January 12, 2008) each time you upload a new MindMap to us or write about us in a blog you get automatic entry!

The winner gets to choose between iPod Nano for himself or donating a Cow to African village (we make a donation on the winners name). Basically it comes down to this

There are two ways to enter sweepstake

1. Upload MindMap to Mappio.com

MindMap must be in FreeMind, MindManager or Plain Text format. MindMaps with offensive language or copyright violations will be disqualified. One MindMap gives you one entry. Unlimited entries per user. You can start uploading now.

2. Blog about Mappio.com or about this sweepstake

One blog post gives you one entry. Each link in the blog post that points to Mappio.com and has any of these words “MindMap, MindMapping, FreeMind, MindManager” gives you an extra entry (up to 5 entries per blog post). Send a link to your post to info@mappio.com with “sweepstake blog post” in the subject line.

Misc notes

• Drawings will be held on January 12. Rules to be determined.
• Cow donation will be made through Oxfam America Unwrapped
• You can track your competition by visiting recently uploaded MindMap

Just verified compatibility with TPAssist 2007 plugin for MindManager. Special thanks to Brad Allen for providing samples.

You can see TPAssist samples online at

http://mappio.com/mindmap/alexu/sample-to-do-list-tpassist-2007-variant
http://mappio.com/mindmap/alexu/committee-for-xyz-meeting-manager-and-minutes

Please welcome

• new Homepage design
• new View MindMaps template
• new Edit MindMap template
• new Search/Top MindMaps
• brand new View FullScreen Mode

At the moment MindManager and FreeMind image previews are rendered at 1024×768 pixels. If it is not enough - let me know and I will try to increase it. I am going to do a pass of usability testing with offshore company over the next week or so. If you have any ideas/suggestions - please post here.

FreeMindShare.com

Looks like a brand new service. Probably a hobby project of a professional developer. Just launched few weeks ago. Uses the FreeMind Flash Browser by KenR. No previews yet. No support for other formats yet. No visible marketing campaign or promotion. It looks like most maps posted by one user KHMS (could be the author?).

You can see that service just start from his Alexa rating ~1.300.000 at the time of writing, which probably means about 20 unique visitors a day.

I should say - interesting. Competition is always good for the customer, but is it good for Mappio? We will see

Looking at the success of YouTube.com, MetaCafe.com and Scribd.com I decided to move Mappio.com toward “Sharing”. In the next few weeks I will be rolling out few important new features:

• Ability to upload/browse/download FreeMind and MindManager files.
• Tagging
• Related MindMaps lookup
• Full Screen view mode

MindManager and FreeMind maps will have thumbnails and will be searchable by title and tags. This should get us some new users!

I will keep supporting all existing Text-To-MindMap features.

Over past few month I have been asking myself - can I really compete with Mindmeister.com, Mindomo.com, Mind42.com and other online mind mapping tools? The answer is “yes, I can”, but simple traffic analysis shows that this is a sad place to be…

I looked at Alexa rating for top 3 online mind mapping solutions. This is a popularity rating. The lower rating the better. Yahoo! has rating 1, Google has rating 2, etc.

mindmeister.com - 43,878

mindomo.com - 93,000

mind42.com - 146,000

Roughly, this translates to 50,000-200,000 page views a month range. This is not a happy place to be for the website that generates its revenue from advertising.

Btw, within 6 weeks of launching Mappio.com traffic reached ~25,000 page views a month and keeps climbing up.

Any ideas how mindmeister.com supports itself? Do they have enough paying customers?