The fantasy sports industry has grown to the point where many of the best new ideas are not for standalone products or services but those that work with existing platforms to make things easier for fantasy players. Pickemfirst fits that category.

Launched in early September, Pickemfirst is a Firefox plug-in that allows users to check a player’s fantasy-league availability whenever they come across his name in online text.

You simply have to register with the site, enter your fantasy teams and install the plug-in. Then you can run Pickemfirst on any page, and the program with find all player names and tag them with icons that indicate their availability in the leagues you’re tracking.

“The idea came out of my own frustration as a fantasy player,” creator Alain de Raynal told FSB.com. “I knew very little about baseball when I started, so I’ve always relied on blogs to educate myself and improve my teams. Once I had found a promising player on a blog, it took at least 10 seconds to check if he was available in my fantasy league. Of course 90 percent of the time, he wasn’t. Those 10 seconds added up into hours and hours.”

As de Raynal points out, that time only increases when one tracks teams on multiple commissioner sites. Pickemfirst, however, allows users to enter teams from leagues on CBS Sports, ESPN, MyFantasyLeague, NFL.com, RotoWire and Yahoo! and will list every team for you whenever you click a player icon.

Partnerships with RotoWire and Fantasy Sharks also enable Pickemfirst to populate “news” and “projections” tabs (respectively) for the players. The window also presents tabs for player stats and even Tweets for those players with Twitter accounts.

(Those extra features are free for a week, but users will have to pass along Pickemfirst invites to friends to enable them full time. Users will also need to make sure that Firefox is set to accept third-party cookies, which kept me from running the plug-in at first.)

Pickemfirst supported baseball for the final month of that season and now works for football, but de Raynal said they plan to add other sports and support more commissioner sites in the future. He said his team is also currently working on a version for Internet Explorer, which sounds like it will probably be available for the 2010 baseball season.

In the meantime, though, here’s a video to show you just how the service works …