Brainstorming 101 with bubbl.us 2.0 beta

I’m a big fan of utilising different brainstorming techniques to flesh out ideas and get past things that I’m stuck on.

You’ll often find me drawing little bubbles and blocks and squares trying to work through a business idea or map out my task list for a project which is why this tool kind of caught my eye.

I’m not exactly sure where I stumbled across it, but it’s a funky little web based tool called bubbl.us.

bubbl.us is basically a web based brainstorming tool you can use for mind mapping and more. Now, there’s no shortage of brainstorming tools out there on the web, but this one is free tool and for something that’s a freebie has some really great intuitive features.

The Good

You can change colors of bubbles, hang things off bubbles, free type text, resize and more. You can also download your brainstorm as an image or store it on their servers for later use.

They’ve got two versions, the original bubbl.us and their version 2 beta (*update below). I took one look both and quickly found that it’s not really even worth using the original as the beta far surpasses it in terms of easy use.

It’s beta, so there’s some annoying “features”

There are a few things I did find that were missing or annoying about the program though with the main one being I’d much rather being able to click on the bubbles and not have them automatically think I’m trying to edit them. Save that action for a double click, maybe. I found it hard to move bubbles around quickly and reorder things fast because of this.

Also, the defaulting colors of new bubbles aren’t contrasting enough. I didn’t want to have to go in and manually change the color each time I created a new child bubble.

A fun, intuitive tool

Other than those small gripes the tool is quite fun and intuitive which I liked and they are releasing some really cool features as the weeks go on.

My first serious use of the tool was a quick brainstorm for an idea and within 15 minutes I’d mapped the whole thing out including tasks to make it happen. Beauty.

Go try it out today for your self and let me know what you think about it.

* Update: Looks like they’ve updated, version 2.0 is now mainstream. It’s feeling pretty stable.

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