Imindi: A new kind of conversation?

 

Beta-launched at the beginning of this week, Imindi (http://imindi.com) was introduced as a "thought-engine", a tool for "thought-networking". What does that mean? What are thoughts? And what is a network of thoughts? Is there a place for a network of thoughts on the Internet? Does it fill a real need? With all the existing tools already at our disposal (like blogs, wikis, shared documents, mindmaps, tag clouds, etc.), do we really need a new place to host our thoughts?

Lots of unusual questions popping up here... As one of the beta-testers, I will try here to give my first impressions of the product and my view on these questions.

 

Thoughts vs facts

First of all, thoughts are not facts. Thoughts are not information items, but are about information items. In other words, thoughts are views about events and things. Most of the time, they are "personal" and seem stored in the head of individual persons, but we hear more and more about  "collective thoughts", also known as "memes". Is this collective mind what Imindi is after?

There are two streams running in parallel: on the one hand we have the information stream, and on the other hand we have a stream of thoughts. Until now, we have heard a lot about the need to structure the information stream, the stream of news: RSS, Twitter, Friendfeed and the like are great tools to connect to this stream. Another very significant effort to capture this stream is the "web of linked data", the machine-readable database of facts that the semantic web is trying to build. Its aim is to construct a global graph of objects and properties that will help us structure the world of information, the world of facts, the world of data.

But let's leave data, facts, news and information aside for now and concentrate on what Imindi is about, namely the world of thoughts, the world of ideas. So, thoughts are about information: they are things like beliefs, opinions, likes and dislikes, predictions, expectations, statements of intentions, desires, feelings, abstract analyses, remarks, classifications, metaphors, explanations, interpretations, appreciations, value judgments, truth assessments, conceptual distinctions, conceptual analyses, etc.

All of these are what Bertrand Russell and analytic philosophers after him have called "propositional attitudes".  While propositions denote facts, thoughts are attitudes with respect to propositions. "What a proposition is, is one thing. How we feel about it, or how we regard it, is another. We can accept it, assert it, believe it, command it, contest it, declare it, deny it, doubt it, enjoin it, exclaim it, expect it." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propositional_attitude)

 

What Imindi does (or says it will do)

So, what does Imindi tell us it will do? First, it asks us to just feed it with our thoughts (our reactions to what happens in the world), expressed in natural language, as we do for instance when we write blog posts. And then it promises to do some "thought-crunching" that will automatically connect thoughts together.

To start with, Imindi uses an entity extraction algorithm to select some words from the thoughts we feed into it (mostly places, names, companies are extracted by the present algorithm). And then it displays a representation that looks very much like a Freemind mindmap. Other representations of thoughts could of course be used (e.g., tag-clouds). For some reasons, the Imindi team decided to stick with the mindmaps that were used when Imindi was presented at TechCrunch-50 last September.

What happens next is that Imindi will use its semantic technology to connect different thoughts based on the entities that have been extracted in the previous step. Each extracted node is a potential link to another thought. Co-occurrence of the same node in different thoughts create links between thoughts, and therefore a "thought-network".

And well... this is pretty much where I am now, after a few hours of testing...

 

The future

Many exciting new features are in the planning phase and should appear in the coming days and weeks. Some reward mechanisms (based on the fact that popular thoughts will often be merged into other thoughts) will encourage people to produce new, original thoughts. A mindmap editing function will help the user correct the automatically generated mindmap: the present implementation does not allow manual "curation" of the automatically extracted tags; we should soon have a combination of manual work and automated entity-extraction and merge. Also, notification mechanisms will be improved and tell you when somebody has added something to one of your thoughts.

 

What should you put into Imindi?

Don't use it for stating facts, don't use it just for pointing at things you find interesting. Use it for expressing your beliefs, desires, predictions, appreciations. Use it to discuss the meaning of terms and their applicability to the topic you are discussing. Use it to express nuances, to make distinctions, to clarify misleading uses of certain terms. Use it to criticize other thoughts you encounter, to express your skepticism, your doubts, your surprises. Use it to express your original perspective on a topic. Remember that the general form of a thought is not "X is a Y", but rather: "I think that X is a Y". 

Use it to let go your imagination. Let your thoughts flow and see what happens.

What will happen? Can automated thought-crunching give us something really useful in return of the efforts we will have to invest in expressing our thoughts? I'm not sure really yet. Is the timing right for launching a startup on this kind of thing? I'm not sure either. Will it be an easy exercise for us as users? Are we all ready for it? I seriously doubt it. I just think it's worthwhile to give it a serious try because it should be fun, and also because it could actually work. We'll see in the coming weeks and months how the database of thoughts evolve, we'll be excited when the first really interesting merges pop up, if they do.

You have two ways of participating: either you create a new thought and wait for someone to react to it, or just browse the already existing discussions and jump in!

 

What will we get from Imindi?

If it works, we will get more of what thoughts usually bring us: explanations, surprises, emotions, feelings of pleasure, of disgust, haha moments, eureka moments, hmmm moments. Ideally, it will also make collaborative thinking and collaborative creativity more real than they are now.

It will support our conversations by giving them more structure than the threads we are used to. When the mindmap editing functions will be integrated, Imindi will be used as a collaboration tool, allowing users to construct and control a shared representation of their thoughts and beliefs.

The first use however is likely to be brainstorming and interactive exploration of an idea or a topic.It will function as a discovery tool, allowing us to discover interesting ideas related to our thoughts, to discover people that view things a bit differently.We will see our thoughts evolve in unexpected ways as they merge with other people's thoughts. The idea is that each one of us has his own train of thoughts. Thoughts pop up in our heads by association. Imindi will let the association occur not just in one brain but in many brains at the same time.

 

Is Imindi for everybody?

In its current form, I would say definitely no. If the typical Twitter user posts a few of his tweets into Imindi, he will be very disappointed to see what Imindi does with it, and probably will quickly give up using it. I would  actually be very surprised if Imindi received massive support from the crowd in its current state. At this stage, the Imindi design looks very open, which is great for early adopters and experimenters who are interested in participating in the construction of a new kind of conversation tool. I fully agree with Erik Schonfeld's statement that "right now, this is for early beta testers willing to put up with flaws in the system." We saw a serious flaw already a couple days ago with the unfortunate deletion of a large number of the TechCrunch invited accounts. There will be other flaws. If fundamental changes are made to the design, I wouldn't be too sure about backward-compatibility. Also, at some point, node deletion will be implemented, which might orphan some of your thoughts. So, if you think you have come up with particularly interesting thoughts, just keep a copy of them somewhere in a text file, so that you can feed them back into Imindi if something goes wrong. Just don't think of Imindi as a finished tool, think of it as a baby, and of yourself as part of the baby's environment. It should be exciting to watch the baby grow.

 

Conclusion

Lost in the ocean of distracting facts and contingent news, thoughts are rare and indeed very precious. There is an important sense in which they are what really matters to us, as an essential aspect of our human nature. They are also important in a more "practical" sense, playing a central role in the economy, as the major source of all the inventions that lead to new products. There are now new web applications like Imindi, Primal Fusion and, maybe to a lesser extent, Twine, that really focus on thoughts and try to isolate them from the stream to make them more visible and reinforce their efficiency. My view is that such applications will have a great impact on how the web evolves.

I personally find extremely attractive the fact that this project is very ambitious. It's got the nice A.I. feel that you also find in projects like Wolfram|Alpha and Twine. It's not just an ordinary web app: it wants to be disruptive and revolutionize the way we communicate and think together. Maybe it will fail, if the problem of efficient thought-modeling and thought-merging turns out to be too complex for the current technology. But it certainly looks worth giving it a try.

 

I just put this post into Imindi and here are some screendumps:

 

 

 

 

 

Related articles by Zemanta

• Imindi looks for more fund (yihongs-research.blogspot.com)
• How Much Leeway Do You Give To Betas? (blogstring.com)
• Connect Your Thoughts To The Mindex With Imindi (Private Beta Invites) (techcrunch.com)