Hyperwords was released yesterday and it is a very cool extension for Firefox and Flock. It has been developed by Liquid-Information an interesting company with an advisory board that reads like a who’s who in IT (Doug Engelbart, Vint Cerf, Ted Nelson, Bruce Horn, Dave Farber, Joi Ito, etc.

What does it do? Well, the default behaviour is that, when you select text in your browser, a drop-down menu appears, giving you instantly available options of what to do with the text –

This is quite cool and allows quick and easy access to functionality you might otherwise have to go to other pages to get. The Preferences settings for the plug-in allows you to select whether the data you select opens in a new tab, or a new page, in the foreground or background. Also, all the menu options are available from the keyboard – so for the example above, I can simply type s s g and a Google Search for the highlighted term will open in a new tab (in the background in my case)!

It is also possible to turn off the menu (operate in invisible mode) and still have access to the keyboard options.

Two minor gripes I have with the extension are:

1. The blog this with option only goes to Blogger and WordPress.com – it needs to allow blogging to other blog platforms like WordPress, Typepad etc.
2. The drop-down menu doesn’t give a View Selection Source option – I sometimes like to view the source of a small portion of a page. In Firefox, I select that portion, right-click and select View Selection Source – this should also be possible in Hyperwords

Other than that I think this is a great plug-in.

The CEO of Hyperwords is called Frode Hegland (Frode is pronounced to rhyme with road). I interviewed Frode about this new extension and will publish that interview on PodLeaders.com as a podcast tomorrow. Frode gave me some fascinating insights into how he came up with Hyperwords and how he landed such an amazing Advisory Board!