Flyswat

January 31, 2000 7:58 PM

Flyswat is a crazy new app that adds metadata to any page you're viewing on the web. When you click on the newly hyperlinked words, it shows a popup with extra info about the word. Here's this site, Slashdot, and prolific.org screenshots (notice it actually recognized "0sil8" as a word). I also thought it was kind of funny it uses the same link colors as this site for it's hyperlinks. If you thought weblogs were a huge time sink, just imagine when every page you see has all sorts of offsite related links...
posted by mathowie (3 comments total)

I had heard of Flyswat before. Now I remember where I had seen them: in the first "We love Mahir!" photo to surface.
posted by jason at 9:27 PM on January 31, 2000

Heh, I remember thinking that the flyswat logo was fun when I saw that pic. I installed flyswat tonight, and I have to admit that I find all the extra hyperlinks a little distracting from the intended content of a page. On the other hand, I can see turning it on while I browse the CNN site, just for the extra backgrounder info, although they'll need to update their info before it's *really* useful in that respect.
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 11:16 PM on January 31, 2000

There's a thing at guru.net that does a similar thing, though I find it less obtrusive than FlySwat. Basically you alt-click any word in any program (IE/Netscape, your mail client, whatever), and it brings up a dictionary definition, related links, books to buy, links suggested by other people about that word, etc. Kinda neat. Too bad it made my NT box at work all wonky after installing it. YMMV.
posted by endquote at 8:09 AM on February 1, 2000