I serendipitously happened across MindMeister about thirty minutes ago.

Since then, I’ve created a mind map from scratch, plus imported and exported maps with FreeMind – my incumbent mind-mapping software. (The importing/exporting appears to work very well. This is one of the capabilities of Google Docs & Spreadsheets that makes it a keeper, so kudos to the MindMeister team infor getting this right in a beta version!)

So, based on less-than-an-hour’s experience, I am quite impressed. This is yet another example of a browser-based application that performs as if it’s installed locally – on a powerful laptop/desktop! Although I haven’t been able to confirm this yet, I suspect that MindMeister is based on AJAX – just like Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

As you can read for yourself from more-comprehensive reviews, others are also impressed with MindMeister even though it lacks a number of features/functionalities. For example as a former use of Mindjet MindMapper, and current, frequent user of FreeMind, what I’m missing the most in MindMeister (so far) is the ability to attach notes and hyperlinks to my nodes. I’m sure that capabilities such as these aren’t far away.

In addition to being intuitive and responsive, the online aspect of MindMeister is impressive. Taking another page out of the Google Docs & Spreadsheets’ book, this inherently online element is used to enable collaboration.

And just to close with some wild speculation … MindMeister would make a nice acquisition target for Google. It’d be a complimentary inclusion in their expanding online productivity portfolio. I would also expect it to be an interesting fit with Google’s JotSpot wiki and even Google Notebook.