Instant Outlining

I was a huge fan of ThinkTank ("the idea processor") back in the 1980s, and I am so sad that the concept never made it mainstream. Thinktank was a simple outline processor that let you type your thoughts, one line at a time, in outline form and then easily move items around, collapse, expand, etc. The idea was eventually expanded into a product called More, which carried the concept into multimedia, letting you add media to your outline. There were some copycat programs like this too, but as best I can tell, the whole market died when Microsoft Word added a feature by the same name. Unfortunately, outlining in Word is a pathetic shadow of what you'd really do in an outline processor, so anyone exposed to the concept through Word quickly abandons it as a waste of time.

Well now I see that David Winer and others have updated the idea as Instant Outlining. This time it's all network based and serves as a collaboration tool. Imagine a manager doing an outline that his/her subordinates can modify. The person at the top can start a topic and everyone in the group can easily collaborate, adding, expanding, collapsing at will, but the overall picture is kept summarized by the leader at every step. This seems way more efficient than email. At Microsoft some groups are already using tools from Groove that attempt to provide a similar experience, and although I haven't used Groove myself, my first reaction is that Instant Outlining seems like a simpler, more efficient idea.