What people are saying about Thortspace
I am starting this article as a way of keeping track of articles and reviews about thortspace written or published by third parties.
If you looking more for things that are like case studies contrasted with things that are more like endorsements (this article) see this article instead:
Visual Mapper blog
“The graphical knowledge mapping arena is kinda boring Well it was; that is until Thortspace arrived.” ~ Wallace Tait, Visual Mapper blog
Serious Insights — Market Analysis: Why Mind Mapping is a 21st Century Necessity
“Thortspace may be the first idea to attempt to redefine Buzan’s mind mapping approach since its inception.” Daniel W. Rasmus
ListofFreeware.com
ListofFreeware.com says about Thortspace :
“It is beautifully designed and intuitive 3D mind mapping through which you can create some very complex 3D mind maps.”
See: https://listoffreeware.com/best-free-3d-mind-mapping-software-windows/
Note: Although quite complementary in lots of ways, the article linked above is factually wrong (as at 5th July 2019) about the Thortspace when it says that in order to use the App you have to register a Thortspace account. You can in fact use the Thortspace App “local only” without any login or registration. Hopefully that is made clear by the following article: https://medium.com/thortspace/dear-thortspace-is-thortspace-free-3d5802c2b018
Please note that this article is factually incorrect about the Thortspace App not having support for saving locally and requiring users to login.
For all the versions up to the current one, the Thortspace App has supported both local saving and working locally without logging in to Thortspace cloud.
Although that does mean you miss out on all the benefits of Thortspace cloud (sync, backup, real-time collaboration etc.) on which public use is free, and private use fairly inexpensive.
If there is any change to the availability of using the Thortspace App “local only” we will give people plenty of notice about that.
“I was personally working on a little 3D Mind Mapping App, that is, until I came across Thortspace and fell in love with it immediately;”
College of Exploration
“Thortspace is an exciting development in mapping thoughts and ideas. It is ‘3D mind-mapping software’. ”
Doug Morrison — Mardinet.org, 6w2x.com
Pair Mentoring and Team Mentoring Using Novel Thought Processor 03
“We use a novel thought-processor called Thortspace. Thortspace overview: 3D thought-processor. Non-hierarchical. Ideas placed in groups on spheres. Category sets. Paths. Several presentation modes.”
The slide show from the presentation is accessible here on SlideShare.
Swim To The Light
“Thortspace — a simple, graphically rich mind mapping tool. Easy to use for collaborative brainstorming on ideas and direction.”
Rennie Hoare
“Impactful philanthropy is complicated. Thortspace helps you cut through the complexity and really make a difference.”
Professor Dasaratha Rama — Florida International University
Dasaratha Rama is a Professor at the School of Accounting at Florida International University.
“ When I want to rapidly capture thoughts, Thortspace is a clear winner.”
~ Prof. Dasaratha Rama, FIU.
Professor Dasaratha has a medium page here and has written a number of articles about using thortspace:
And ADDITTogether on twitter…
wiredroots.org
“Creating a physical representation of these networks allows us to get more strategic about how we navigate them, as well as helping us to define where we need to expand them as we evolve in our practices. Mind mapping is a great way to do this, either by hand or using tools like Xmind or Thortspace. This is an often overlooked practice in self-directed learning.” [from Learning and Unlearning into an Uncertain Future, by Tom Palmer, page 16]
Bob Clark
“Thortspace is like watching old Kung Fu movies. It’s poorly dubbed, comically so in spots. But you get used to it.” ~ Bob Clark … see: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thortspace/permalink/3034427593272090/
Schools of Tomorrow
“For the first four days of October I travelled around the west of England for Schools of Tomorrow to train students on Thortspace. The results of the training sessions were very positive and encouraging, students seemed to have great fun with the software.” ~ Xavier Canute Nao Gibbons
ProjectKidsWorldwide.org
Best features:
- 3D mind mapping
- Crowd-thinking platform
- User-generated content
Kathryn Best
“Thortspace builds a roadmap of what you have.
Thortspace has many different possible applications; however for me the great potential is to help those individuals or organisations in the formative stages of getting their thoughts together. It’s sharable, collaborative, intuitive and the best part — it begins to build a roadmap of what you have, to help you realise that a few initial, raw ideas can stimulate more new ideas and shared conversations, and take things much further in a short space of time.”
David Keighley
“From the moment I saw Thortspace on my screen, I sensed excitement…
I have been lucky enough to have been using Thortspace for almost two years now. From the moment I saw Thortspace on my screen, I sensed excitement, and I was not disappointed. My first task was writing a complex, multi-tiered report about whether or not the BBC was meeting requirements for impartiality. This was familiar territory for me, but transferring data on to Thortspace immediately opened up new dimensions. The 3-D linkages generated by the spheres facilitated both new insights and new lines of data management, and — almost magically — I could ‘see’ the key issues much more clearly. For the future, I know that in my professional domain there will be dozens of applications relating to the human mind in all its astonishing complexity. The only problem is knowing where to start!”
Joe Kay
Founder of Team Intelligence startup Enswarm — https://enswarm.com/ says:
“[Thortspace] is an application that allows a group to map out their collective thoughts in 3D”.
Gregory Tasonis
Gregory Tasonis says:
“Take a look at “Thortspace” as an example. IMHO, MM will become a freely available educational and engineering methodolgy and solution space…not a commercial success story.”
Pierre Mongin
Pierre Mongin is author of numerous books on how to benefit from mind-mapping and visual thinking.
Pierre says:
“Mercredi 18 mai 2016 sort un nouveau logiciel qui permet de faire du mind mapping en trois dimensions. De fait, ce serait plutôt du concept mapping puisque les connexions se font dans les trois dimensions alors que le mind mapping est le plus souvent limité aux deux dimensions largeur/longueur.”
Volker-Christian Lehmann mindundmap-Coach & Fachhandel
Volker-Christian Lehmann includes thortspace in the list of mind-mapping software he supports.
Eddie Capstick from makesense.org
“We’re examining technologies e.g. Thortspace etc and also some of the existing maps.”
Level39 — and the Lean Startup Summit
(where thortspace was voted in the top three exhibitors)
The Thortspace App and Thortspace Web portal were designed out of research initially funded by Edward Hoare of Hoare’s bank.
com3elles
“ Pour les plus aguerris à la méthode, Thortspace propose même depuis mai 2016 des cartes mentales en 3D, permettant d’accentuer ou non les distances, les proportions, les relations aux autres items, de ne pas confondre les branches entre elles…”
LikeInMind.com Thortspace Criticism
Here is a list of Thortspace pros and cons that I created in response to someone’s question. As with any software, pros and cons, while Plectica is stronger in some important ways, the pros of Thortspace make this tool work better for us. I compare Plectica and Thortspace because these are the two I consider “rapid brainwriting tools.” kumu looks elegant but not for rapid brainwriting.
Pros:
1. Node-link diagram can be viewed as table
2. Ease of transfer to Excel
3. Can easily re-arrange ideas into groups
4. Visually engaging — I share a lot in Facebook groups, people respond well to Thortspace
5.Circles rather than squares (will say more on this later)
6.Use of color. Ananth (our son) finds color useful in learning. A view such as the one below is very helpful for him. He also likes being able to pull one up, and I can easily create Excel version (see pictures below)
7. I can show journeys. I will make Anatomy sphere into journey and share soon.
8. Journeys means stories. I like Thortspace for storytelling.
9. Thortspace embeds well on my website. See https://www.addittogether.com/music-in-the-cloud for an example
10. Very important for me: Phil Shepherd and Andrew Bindon are very approachable, open to feedback, and highly engaged.Cons:
1. Cannot manipulate information on the web, desktop only
2. Support for modeling relationships needs to be strengthened
3. Should have choice of colors (specifying hex codes). I want to be able to use my brand colors.
4. Some features such as labeling maps that kumu does really well.
5. Would like to be able to store more data with each node — again kumu is very good at this
Outliner Software.com
A fairly damming critique of Thortspace on OutlineSoftware.com, although in fairness to Thortspace I don’t think many of the contributors to this discussion have actually tried Thortspace out all that much.
For example, one of the comments says that they aren’t going to try Thortspace because they don’t like subscription services and wouldn’t trust a company smaller than Google with their cloud data, which completely ignores that the vast majority of Thortspace functionality is currently available in the free stand-alone app which can work in “local-only” mode without any sign-in or subscription at all.
Another thing that I suppose is not obvious from our marketing materials and perhaps should be is that Thortspace cloud data is actually stored on Google cloud storage (Gooisoft pays Google for the privilege of storing customer data on Google’s cloud). So there is a certain amount of irony in saying they wouldn’t want to use a cloud service other than one of the big ones: Google or Amazon.
I have tried to address concerns about data privacy in this article:
Thortspace services are Powered by Google App Engine:
Thortspace Premium and Free services run on Google App Engine and your sphere data is stored on Google’s Cloud Data storage. Your data is as secure on our service as it is on any of Google’s native services.
AlternativeTo says:
Thortspace is an alternative to: Lucidchart, draw.io, Freemind, MS Visio, Mindmeister, Mindomo, Mindnode, Coggle, OmniGraffle, Edraw Max, ThinkComposer, SimpleMind, WiseMapping, Grafio, SmartDraw, Cacoo, M8!, Mindmapper, PathVisio, Bubbl.us, iMindMap, eDraw, Thinkwise, SpiderScribe, Creately, Seavus DropMind, Mind42, ConceptDraw Pro, and iMindQ (among others !)
See: https://alternativeto.net/software/thortspace/ — feel free to vote us up if you want to … :-)
Cabrera Research
“B overall rating; simple, useable; some great features and one of the best cognitive architectures out there; Biggest downsides: No P; No RDS; UI feels like 1980’s; some layout challenges.”
José Ricardo de Oliveira Cândido Santos, UNIVERSIDADE ABERTA
“Quanto à ferramenta «Thortspace», distingue-se das restantes pelo aspeto visual, pois os mapas concetuais nela criados têm como desenho base o pensamento visual 3D.”
GrowthMinds.com
GrowthMinds lists Thortspace as one of top 300 UK Tech Startups to watch out for in 2020.
“The only tool that can reach closer to what 3D mind mapping needs is Thortspace.”
Vaiscope
What is VaiScope?… massive opportunity, open, organic, virtual, ai, blockchain evolving! (under continuous development)
Arrow Solutions Group
Thortspace is featured in Arrow Solutions Group article on “10 Trends in Knowledge Management”.
The Everybody Wiki
Cnet — Thortspace Collaboration Software
“In order to cope effectively with complex projects we need to be able to think systemically and dynamically; we need to be able to achieve a level of insight in respect of the whole system of interconnected aspects and relationships with which we are dealing.”
Jo Whiley talks about mind bubbles on Radio 2
People on Quora
Arrange
Keyword zoom
Transition
Rotate
Scale
Group ordering
Academics
- Thortspace Collaborative Mind Mapping Software — Imperial College London University
- Thortspace Collaborative Mind Mapping Software — Imperial College London University
- Open Research Online — The Open University — Emke, Martina (2019). FREELANCE LANGUAGE TEACHERS’ PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT ON…AND WITH…AND THROUGH TWITTER. EdD thesis The Open University.
- Thortspace Collaborative Mind Mapping Software — Seeing Success with a Storytelling Sphere
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