Why Hyperwords?

There are two aspects to this question: Why did we build it and why should you use it?

We would say the answers are pretty simple: We developed Hyperwords to help save the world and you should use Hyperwords if you feel it's useful for your work.

Why we developed Hyperwords

It has been clear to us that interactive networked computers hold incredible potential to help individuals and teams do knowledge work. It has been equally clear to us that interactive text can mean more than clicking on hand-made links.

This is why we dedicated our careers to finding out what would be useful for knowledge workers. (By knowledge workers we mean anyone who spends a significant part of their work day dealing with information, including scientists, business executives, students and most other people in the modern economy.)

We have spent a lot of time trying to ignore the current computer environment, trying to see this afresh with a mindset that if we can describe the process in unambigious terms about specific data in specific ways the user can interact with this process then it can be built.

We also got together with some of the people who thought about these issues way before we got the Steve (Jobs) & Bill (Gates) computers we have today.

First stop was Doug Engelbart who, in 1962 wrote a seminal paper called 'Augmenting Human Intellect' and in 1968 gave what has since been called 'The Mother of all Demos' where he demonstrated the first interactive computer with a computer mouse, word processing and most of what we today take for granted.

Doug not only had time to meet with us, but over the last decade and a half we became friends and we were even honored to be allowed to make a small documentary on his work called Invisible Revolution.

Doug's clear vision of augmenting how we solve urgent, complex problems collectively has been a guiding light for us and he has been a constant dialog partner and we are forever grateful.

Along the way we have also enjoyed the colorful and inspirational company of Ted Nelson who coined the word 'hypertext' and who has kindly endorsed the name 'Hyperwords'.

Bruce Horn, Vint Cerf and Dave Farber have also been an integral part of the Hyperwords team. You can read all about them and the rest of the gang in the 'About Us' section.

With all this history and theory and late night Starbucks discussions we should maybe have written scientific papers (we published one, in the British HCI Journal) or perhaps even a book.

But we started this project in order to have an immediate and real effect on how people do their work. Not to have the most polished dissertation on how they should be doing their work.

We tried different approaches including an email and news group service called 'Liquid Information' and promptly drove into the first dot com crash.

Urged on by Doug Engelbart's suggestion that 'the hypertext community' define what they mean by the prefix 'hyper' we started playing around with the notion of richly interactive text.

First in an internal blogging system but not long after as a basic Mozilla Firefox extension which got a lot of initial press thanks to our illustrious Advisory Board and very persistent manner with journalists.

We launched at a BBQ at Doug Engelbart's house and saw user numbers grow, then level off and to our shock and horror, drop!

We know the early releases of Hyperwords was basic, but surely people would just 'get it' and be supportive'.

But we decided it was worth pursuing so we discussed every single user praise, criticism or suggestion email, went back to basics and kept developing the theory and goals of what Hyperwords was supposed to be and after boiling it down to one word (as heard by a potential user at Stanford who had just been given the 30 second pitch), Hyperwords should be 'useful'.

And that is what we have kept as our focus - making Hyperwords less and less annoying (yes, it's a simple thing but there have been many tiny annoyances to iron out over the years!), more 'handy' (accesible at the time of need) and more fully featured (giving you greater options). In other words: More Useful.

At the time of writing this in August 2008, Hyperwords for Firefox has 150,000 users a day, we are making enough money to support most of our efforts and user numbers are increasing. And we have Hyperwords for Windows coming our in a few months. It seems Hyperwords is becoming useful for more and more people.

Why you should use Hyperwords

Hyperwords gives you more options for interacting with and navigating through text on the web.

It gives you more (options, commands, possibilities!) for less (clicks and mousing around).

For example, without Hyperwords, to look up the Wikipedia entry of text you are reading (fx: "Arizona") you would likely:

Select "Arizona",
choose copy,
open a new browser window,
type www.wikipedia.org or click on the bookmark,
paste "Arizona" in the search box,
hit enter,
read the entry and
close the window.

If you are using Hyperwords its less work:

Select "Arizona",
choose 'References'/'Wikipedia from the menu that pops up.
Read the entry right there in the menu.
Click away.

So why is this such a big deal? Are we saying you are lazy? No, not at all. But Hyperwords lowers the cognitive load (less thinking, hopefully so much less thinking you don't notice and it doesn't contribute to any mental fatigue during the day) so that the chance of the action being carried out increases to the point where it happens more often that it does now.

This is of course one of the benefits of the World Wide Web itself - it makes it much more likely that you will actually go and get information than if you would have to go to the library. For example.

The result is that you have additional knowledge so close to hand you'll use it.

It means that the likelihood you'll share something useful with someone else is increased and your team is better informed.

It means that foreign information is no longer foreign when you can read it in your native language with a simple selection and by choosing 'translate' from the menu.

It means currencies are never out of date since you can convert right there on the page.

Long documents become readable through the Hyperwords Views.

It means you no longer feel like you are struggling to stay afloat in the new world of massively connected information -- it feels like you are swimming right with it, in total control.