Interclue is a browser add-on (curently only for Firefox) that enhances hyperlinks with link previews, extra information and relevant next actions. It provides you with information about a link, on the link. It includes a text summary of a linked page without you having to open a new tab or window to view it. Take the tour to find out more.

Support for other browser families is being worked on.

Not really. There are many tools that cause some sort of effect when you hover your mouse over a hyperlink. Some of them are scripts for websites, some are browser add-ons. Most of them work quite differently even though they cause similar effects. Most of them are fairly trivial. Snap and Cooliris are the most well known. Interclue is by far the most useful. Check out our reviews if you don't believe us. Better yet, try it out and write your own review.

Lots of our users have been amazed how useful link previews can be when they're done properly, as a user-centric tool rather than as a platform for advertising delivery. Read what our users have to say about Interclue here.

Most of Interclue's features work in languages other then English, as it is able to do a significant amount of summarising based on the structure of the Web page and various language-independent features. Summaries of non-English documents may lack some of the optimising that we currently do in English, but are still definitely usable as long as Web sites specify their character set correctly.

When you click on a download link, Firefox's normal add-on installation dialog should appear, and Interclue will be installed when you click "Install Now". If you're getting it from a source other than addons.mozilla.org, you may also see a security dialog and have to click the "Allow" button.

If you've acquired the interclue.xpi installer in some other way, you can manually run it by using File --> Open from the Firefox menu bar and then selecting interclue.xpi, or you can drag the XPI file's icon onto an open Firefox window. You'll then get the standard add-on installation dialog.

Note that you can't yet install Interclue in non-Firefox browsers such as IE, Safari or Opera.

If you unfortuntely decide that Interclue is not for you:

• in the Firefox menu bar, select "Tools"
• in the resulting menu, select "Add-ons"
• find Interclue in the list of add-ons that pops up (you may need to scroll), select it and click "Uninstall"
• a confirmation dialog will appear — click "Uninstall"
• as usual, you'll need to restart Firefox to complete the process.

Yes. It may be in a somewhat changed form, however — there are several things that Firefox makes possible for add-ons that other browsers do not. If you want to be notified when Interclue is available for your browser, sign up here. In the meantime, you might want to consider giving Firefox a go; it really is a great browser and switching over is easy.

Many different things. Linkclue icons can tell you what website a link goes to, what type of file is being linked to, whether the link is dead and other useful information. Read the Linkclue Reference to find out about all 40+ Linkclue icons.

At the moment, the previews are created entirely by the browser add-on, using a variety of clever content extraction algorithms. In the future Interclue may also offer cached summaries from its own servers.

Metaclues are clues containing metadata related to the link, derived from the link content (e.g., word counts) or from external services such as Digg or del.icio.us.

There are many ways to contact us, but the easiest way is to use the Interclue feedback utility. You can activate this via:

• the Feedback icon (the speech bubble) in the Clueviewer
• the Interclue menu — click "More..." to show the submenu where "Interclue Feedback/BugReporter" is found

Click on the appropriate tab for the sort of feedback you want to send us, and fill in the fields. You don't need to supply your email address, but if you don't, we won't be able to get back to you with questions or comments.

Right-click on the image, and select "Save Image As..." from the menu that appears. This will save the full image from the Web page, not the reduced image displayed by the Clueviewer.

Open up the Interclue Options window via Firefox's Tools menu, the Interclue main menu or the cogwheel icon in the Clueviewer. Select the Advanced tab, then the Clueview Activation panel. There you can choose to show the Clueviewer "When you click on a Linkclue icon".

Open up the Interclue Options window via Firefox's Tools menu, the Interclue main menu or the cogwheel icon in the Clueviewer. Select the Advanced tab, then the Pinned Mode panel. This has an option to change the hotkey(s).

There are a number of ways to temporarily turn off Interclue. You can shut it down entirely or just disable it on selected sites, and reactivate it again at your convenience. This is done via the menu that appears when you click the Interclue icon in your status bar.

Yes, you are in complete control. Only a few of the available buttons are shown by default. To add more, open the Interclue Options window via Firefox's Tools menu, the Interclue main menu or the cogwheel icon in the Clueviewer, then click on the Advanced tab and select the Buttons option.

The most important options can be set by answering three multi-choice questions on the Basic tab in the Options dialog, and the default settings for other options will work reasonably well for most people.

Not usually, but this does happen on occasion. Depending on configuration, there may be conflict with the Snap or Cooliris add-ons (although you will probably find that using Interclue allows you to uninstall these). In addition, some Stylish stylesheets may interact with Interclue in inconvenient ways. Please let us know if you think you may have found a conflict.

None that we know of. Firefox 2 suffers mostly from memory fragmentation, which is different to leaking but has similar effects. Interclue is not immune to this, but in general Clueviewing a page will require much less RAM than opening it in a new tab or opening it in Cooliris. Restarting Firefox 2 from time to time is a good idea with or without Interclue installed. Firefox 3 has much better memory management and we've seen no sign of it having memory problems with Interclue.

There are several possibilities:

1. Interclue is automatically disabled if you're looking at a local HTML file on your own computer
2. You might have accidentally disabled Interclue. If you look at the Interclue icon in the status bar, a grey icon indicates Interclue is disabled while a blue one indicates it is active.
3. If you have turned on the option that forces Firefox to display web pages with your preferred background color, the Linkclue icons will not be visible, due to how Interclue displays them.

The easiest way is to use the Interclue feedback utility. You can activate this via:

• the Feedback icon (the speech bubble) in the Clueviewer
• the Interclue menu — click "More..." to show the submenu where "Interclue Feedback/BugReporter" is found

Click on the appropriate tab for the sort of bug you want to report. The feedback utility can automatically fill in the page and link where things went wrong, and help you provide other details that can help us resolve the problem. Please give us as much information as you can. You don't need to supply your email address, but if you don't, we won't be able to get back to you with questions or comments.

In Firefox, open the Tools menu, select either Add-ons in Firefox 2.0 or Extensions under Firefox 1.5, find Interclue on the list, select it, then click the Uninstall button.

We'll gather as little information as possible to meet your needs. We will allow you to see and amend it for accuracy on demand, and certainly won't pass it on to any other party unless legally obliged to do so. This is partly because New Zealand has very strong privacy legislation, but it's also because that's the kind of culture of privacy we want to live in.

Here's what we do gather:

• The browser add-on itself sends no data back to our servers beyond what appears in a typical web server log when it checks for updates, and whatever you send us via the feedback system.
• The feedback system sends a short amount of click history in the debugging logs if you choose to include it. We'll only use that to debug problems in the browser add-on. If you opt not to send an email address or website where we can get in touch with you about the bug, the information is effectively anonymous.
• You'll need an account on our blog to post comments to that, or an account on another service that supports Open ID. In particular, we'll want an email address from you that we can use to help confirm that you're a real person and not a spam bot. That address will be kept confidential.
• We will also need your email address if you subscribe to one of our discussion groups, which are currently located on Google Groups.

One of the problems with making bold, idealistic promises about data privacy is that companies can be acquired by others, split up and have their properties sold to further companies, which may not operate in a legal jurisdiction that considers personal customer information to be owned by the customers. To tackle that issue, we want to avoid keeping any personal information for any longer than necessary.

To that end:

• Identifying details in bug tickets will be removed when the ticket is closed.
• We will not keep more than a year's worth of web server logs.
• When you unsubscribe from an email list we will remove any record of that email address.
• After we send the notification mail-out for new versions to those who requested them, we will destroy the notification list.

If you join our blog, or one of our Google Groups, those accounts are easily accessible and can be changed and removed.

Our support ticket database is private, but if you want to see the details of all the open tickets you have filed under a particular email address, email us at privacy@interclue.com from the same address and we can provide those for you.

If for some reason you no longer wish to receive any version availability email, email us at unsubscribe@interclue.com from that email address and we will remove it.

Yes. Interclue is free for both private and commercial use. However, if you are getting value from Interclue we'd really appreciate a donation so that we can keep on maintaining and improving it.

It's easy, using Paypal. Read more over here.

Some previews (Amazon product links are the only ones so far) may contain affiliate codes that give Interclue a credit if you click on the product inside the Clueview and then buy it. If the link being previewed already contains an affiliate code, we use that one so the webmaster doesn't miss out. Otherwise, Interclue uses its own affiliate code, because at least in the case of Amazon, you need one to use their product information API.

As part of a subscription service we will be providing a number of additional features, such as faster-loading summaries, summaries better tailored to the sites they're from, improved summaries of various different file-types and much more information relevant to the links.

We're thinking about doing some "White Label" licencing of Interclue -- email us at bizdev AT interclue DOT com if you're interested.

It's not out of the question that we might, eventually, release a version of Interclue with the subscriber level features included for free, but with a bit of advertising included somewhere alongside. We're not big fans of advertising here but you never know, I guess.

And, of course, we have a few angel investors who have helped to get us this far, and we're very grateful to them. They're really hoping we might not need to rely on them much longer, however!

Any users making donations prior to the release of our subscriber version will be given twice the value of their donation as a starting balance in their subscriber account.

At Interclue we are more about giving people free time than we are about giving them free software. But consider this: more free time means more time to write free software, if you're that way inclined... And of course, our basic version is free as in beer. Good, honest, Kiwi beer, and it'll stay that way. Take a sip, go on, you know you want to :-)
More seriously, in Christchurch, New Zealand, no one will pay people to build something "bleeding edge" if they're then going to give it away, and our attempts to pay our own way through the early development stages with consulting revenue were highly frustrating, so we bit of the capitalist coin and took angel investment. We're now honor-bound to deliver a good return on that investment -- and in today's business environment that may well mean raising more capital pretty soon, requiring us to make even more money further down the road. So we can't open the source if that means we won't make any money. If it turns out in the fullness of time that the best way to move the business forward is to open some or all of the source, we'll do that. And well before that, we will be improving, documenting and opening our APIs, and allowing people to build on what we have started, which we think will be good for us, good for developers, and good for the the open web and the global knowledge collective.
If it makes you feel better about trying our free beer, should we eventually manage to make a few shekels, I know I'll personally be donating to support several open, free, just and honest projects going on around the world, and I'll be arguing for the company to do a certain amount of corporate philanthropy in the same direction. You can read more about my technoprogressive ideals on my blog - Seth Wagoner, Geek in Chief, Interclue Ltd

We don't actually think software should be covered by the patent system, and frankly, we think having no patent system at all would be better than the one that's in place now, but when in Rome, as they say... we've made some provisional filings. We don't expect much to come of them. If they ever actually get issued, they might come in handy should one our competitors try to sue us for supposedly infringing on their patents.