Ah, outliners. The poor forgotten class of software.
At one point in time, there were programs like Ecco Pro and Symantec GrandView that allowed you to organize ideas (or articles) in a hierarchy, expanding and collapsing piece of text and moving them around until they made sense.
These days (at least on Windows) you’ve got Microsoft Word’s Outline View and not much else to choose from.
Although I’m weary about web applications, I am intrigued by Thinklinkr (though I’m pretty sure the Web 2.0 “drop a vowel” naming scheme is a little outdated at this point…)
Thinklinkr opens up, giving you a page to write on like a word processor, but each sentence or paragraph and can have a child section attached to it, which in turn have it’s own child section and so on.
So far the features are pretty bare bones for outlining. For example, I don’t immediately see a hoist function (pulling up one paragraph and it’s children by themselves,) but it does have a lot of keyboard shotcuts, helpfully shown at the bottom of the interface.
However, what Thinklinkr lacks in outlining functionality, it does seem to make up in collaborative features.
The systems allows more and one person to work on the same outline and includes a chat window.
That said, when it comes to web based collaboration, they’re facing heavy competition from Google Wave.
But it is nice see someone doing something new in the outliner space.
