Mental Drain

What?

Mental Drain is a service for creating ad hoc online communities in the blink of an eye. Creating a new community is as simple as entering a topic — 'news', 'fast-cars', 'french-history', 'spanish', 'ucla-comp-sci' — anyone can create a community, and anyone can join an existing community.

Not Who ... What

You can follow as many topics — join as many communities — as you please. You receive messages that are posted on any topic you are following. In contrast to other messaging services, the focus of Mental Drain is not on who is posting a message, but what the message contains. You don't follow people, you follow topics.

Your Mental Drain

Each user has their own 'mental drain'. Your mental drain is the stream of messages that have been posted on any of the topics that you are following. It's similar to an email Inbox or RSS feed.

Fishing for Nuggets

A message posted to Mental Drain is called a 'nugget'. Mental Drain is more than just a means of communicating — it's also a learning tool. Any nugget can be 'fished out' of your mental drain. When a nugget gets fished out, it is scheduled to reappear every so often in your mental drain. This can be useful for remembering interesting nuggets.

Mental Drain v. Mental Case

Mental Drain is loosely-based on Mental Case, an application for the Mac and iPhone. Mental Case has advanced features for organizing and studying information; Mental Drain is much simpler, and focussed on social learning.