If you are working on a story, research paper, poem, thesis, game design document or just like discovering cool web apps, you should take two minutes and check out bubbl.us. Now. Seriously. Go!
You start off with a thought bubble that contains your core idea, and from there you can expand this idea with further levels of bubbles, all color coded and connected to each other. You can also share thought maps with other people and let them collaborate with you. It’s useful for team virtual, visual brainstorming when you would otherwise be stuck sharing ideas through Google docs or something.
I used bubbl.us to map out a web of all the characters in a story I am writing, and then connected each character with a bubble that explained the character’s relationship to each other, such as how they know and feel about each other. The main characters and the larger, more complex plots they’re involved in naturally tended to drift to the center of the web, and side characters and side plots got pushed out further. Additionally, I color coded the “relationship” bubbles so character connections that were very important to the overall story were brightly saturated, and sub plots and extra details less so. It was cool to see it naturally evolve before my eyes.
My map had about 12 characters and over 30 bubbles connecting everyone together (and I still have more things to add!), but it was so helpful for me to see everything laid out cleanly as opposed to organizing and updating something monstrous like that on paper. Hope this program is useful to someone else!
