Idea Cloud
Everyone adds ideas, a word cloud grows live.
Free to use · No sign-up needed
Your share link and your manage link appear here once the cloud is made.
Ask a room a question and watch the answers pile up
Ask twenty people for one word and you get silence, then three words at once, then an argument about whose word was best. The quiet people never say theirs at all. An idea cloud takes the turn-taking out: everybody types at the same time, into the same page, and what the room thinks appears as it is thought.
So this one asks for a question and nothing else. No account, no email address, no workspace to be invited to. Press Create idea cloud and you get a short link to read out and a second link that is yours alone. Everyone else opens the first one and watches the cloud fill in around their own words.
How to run one
- Ask for something short. “One word for how this week went” works; “what should our strategy be” gets paragraphs, and a cloud of those is a wall of text.
- Press Create idea cloud. Two links come back.
- Share the first — six characters, so it can be read aloud or written on a whiteboard.
- Keep the second. It is the manage link, and it is how you close the cloud afterwards.
- Let it run. People add as many ideas as they have.
- Read the big ones out. More than one person thought of those, which is usually where the conversation should start.
Three things worth knowing before you start
Repeats make an idea bigger, not longer. Two people typing the same thing are one idea with a count beside it, matched once spaces and capitals are ignored. The count is printed beside anything said twice or more, so the size difference survives a greyscale screenshot.
The cloud expires ninety days after the last idea. Every idea pushes that date out, so a cloud people are still using does not go anywhere. When ninety quiet days pass the page stops working and everything in it is deleted within a day. Unless you signed in to keep it, so there is no way to bring it back.
Anyone with the link can write anything. There is a word filter, and it is a first line rather than a wall. Every shared page carries a Report link that takes the whole cloud off the air on one click, and your manage link is what puts it back. Open this to a room you would open a whiteboard to.
Good uses
- A warm-up: one word for how the week went, or what the room is worried about.
- Brainstorming names, features or risks — anything where quantity comes before judgement.
- A workshop where the loudest three voices would otherwise set the agenda.
- A classroom, where thirty answers arrive at once instead of four hands going up.
When to use something else
A cloud counts repeats; it does not rank, and nobody votes on anything. To choose between options somebody has already written down, that is Live Poll. For questions the room pushes to the top, that is Live Q&A. And if you want sentences rather than words, this is the wrong shape — a cloud of long answers is a list in a bad font.
Questions people ask
- Does anyone need an account?
- No. You make the cloud, you send the link, and people add to it. Nobody has to sign up, nobody has to give an email address, and nobody installs anything. The organiser can sign in if they want to keep it past ninety days and find it again without the link — that is the only thing an account does here, it is optional, and it changes nothing for anybody else. The link works in whatever browser is already open.
- What happens if two people write the same thing?
- It becomes one idea, drawn bigger. Two submissions match when they are the same once spaces and capitals are ignored, so “Pizza”, “pizza” and “ pizza ” are all the same idea. Nothing clever happens beyond that: “dog” and “dogs” stay apart, because merging words somebody meant to keep separate would be us editing what the room said.
- How many ideas can one person add?
- As many as they have. There is no per-person limit, which is the point — a brainstorm where everyone gets one turn is a vote wearing a different hat. The only ceiling is the site's rate limit, sixty entries an hour from one connection, which is there to stop a script and not a person.
- Can I delete one idea?
- Not individually, and that is worth knowing before you open this to a room. You can close the cloud so nothing more lands, and you can delete the whole thing. Anyone can also report a cloud, which takes it off the air immediately until you put it back with your manage link.
- What happens to the cloud afterwards?
- It stays readable until ninety days after the last idea, then it is deleted along with everything in it. There is no archive and no way to get it back, so screenshot or copy anything you want to keep before then.