---
title: 'Product Launch: Thunder Thimble'
teaser:
tags: news,thunder thimble
author: Matt Jankowski
published_on: 2009-05-15
---

![''](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2009-5-15-thunderthimble-apple-touch-icon.png)

We’re pleased to announce the launch of our next product — which is a web based
product called [Thunder Thimble](http://thunderthimble.com/).

For regular readers, yes – this is the same application whose initial prototype
was mentioned here in [how we accidentally redesigned a product in a
week](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-we-accidentally-redesigned-a-product-in-a-week).

## Overview

Thunder Thimble is a web based application meant for monitoring and managing
mentions of your products, services, brands in “social media”.  For now, this
means twitter support only.  In the future, we may add blogs, news, videos,
facebook, etc – or even more “mainstream” web content, but the intention is
really to monitor “current” topics and trends as opposed to all time mentions,
and twitter makes the most sense for this right now.

## Use case

At thoughtbot, we have four areas of operation.  First, our consulting service,
which is the core of our business and for which “thoughtbot” is really the only
brand name involved.  Second, our products like
[WidgetFinger](http://widgetfinger.com) and [Hoptoad](http://www.hoptoadapp.com)
and [TeeBot](http://teebot.thoughtbot.com).  Third, our “fun” projects like
[Umbrella Today](http://umbrellatoday.com) and [Stock
Names](http://www.stocknames.info/).  Finally, our open source projects like
Shoulda, Paperclip, Factory Bot, Squirrel, etc.

Whether it’s to send us praise or complaints, comments or questions – we really
love hearing from people about our work.  The common problem we faced monitoring
and responding to all of this feedback was that we had a plethora of twitter
accounts, support address, contact forms, and so on – and we had different
people (with no real official responsibility to do so) attempting to manage all
of that.

We would also have a “feeling” that – for example – Hoptoad was getting mostly
positive feedback on twitter, but we had never really had any hard metrics to
back that up.  We’ve been using the Thunder Thimble application ourselves for
two months now, and it solves basically all of those problems.

## Features

Now we have a scenario where…

* Multiple people from thoughtbot constantly monitor each of our brands (we have
  rss support for mentions within a brand and across the entire account – this
  replaces Google alerts and twitter search for many of us)
* We can flag tweets as positive or negative, and see trends over time in a
  handsome line graph
* We can embed a javascript widget in a website, which shows recent positively
  rated tweets
* We can reply to messages directly from the tool itself
* We can reply from the relevant account (business, product, personal) depending
  on the message we’re replying to
* We can even enter competitor or complimentor brands, and respond to mentions
  of those if needed

## Recent brand activity

![''](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2009-5-14-Picture_3.png)

## Free plans

You can [sign up today](http://app.thunderthimble.com/users/new) and check out
the product – there’s a even a FREE plan so that you can take it on a trial run
for 30 days before you commit to a paid account.

## Feedback

Thanks to our beta testers for feedback during the last month or so – we think
have a tool that’s at least more valuable than not using it, and we’ve got big
plans for the coming months as well!

We’ve got a
[getsatisfaction](http://getsatisfaction.com/thoughtbot/products/thoughtbot_thunder_thimble)
account set up to handle feedback and feature requests, so let us know what you
think.  We look forward to continue expanding the product in the future.