It got skewered at last year’s TechCrunch50. Then when it finally launched in private beta, it “accidentally deleted” all of its initial user accounts. But iMindi is back and it wants you to help it build the Mindex.
iMindi wants to be a Twitter on steroids. Actually, it is the exact opposite of Twitter. It is more for people who want to have lengthy discussions and explore topics deeply. Instead of a 140-character limit, it has a 20,000-character limit.
You can have threaded discussions about different topics, follow people, and topic categories (”think tanks”). You dump in your thoughts or excerpts from articles, then iMindi does a semantic analysis of the concepts and connect those “thoughts” with other similar ones (this is what they mean by the Mindex). In the private beta, iMindi had some mind map visualizations, but it has abandoned those in the interest of simplicity.
Now all iMindi needs is for people to fill its database so that it can start linking people’s thoughts. I kind of think that going for long-form, blog-like discussions is going to be harder for people to get into than short bursts of micro-information. But it might appeal to people who want something deeper than Twitter.