<p>We’re pleased to announce the launch of our next product — which is a web based product called <a href="http://thunderthimble.com/">Thunder Thimble</a>.</p>
<p>For regular readers, yes – this is the same application whose initial prototype was mentioned here in <a href="http://giantrobots.thoughtbot.com/2009/3/5/how-we-accidentally-redesign-a-product-in-a-week">how we accidentally redesigned a product in a week</a>.</p>
<h2>Overview</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Use case</h2>
<p>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 <a href="http://widgetfinger.com">WidgetFinger</a> and <a href="http://www.hoptoadapp.com">Hoptoad</a> and <a href="http://teebot.thoughtbot.com">TeeBot</a>. Third, our “fun” projects like <a href="http://umbrellatoday.com">Umbrella Today</a> and <a href="http://www.stocknames.info/">Stock Names</a>. Finally, our open source projects like Shoulda, Paperclip, Factory Girl, Squirrel, etc.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Features</h2>
<p>Now we have a scenario where…</p>
<ul>
<li>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)</li>
<li>We can flag tweets as positive or negative, and see trends over time in a handsome line graph</li>
<li>We can embed a javascript widget in a website, which shows recent positively rated tweets</li>
<li>We can reply to messages directly from the tool itself</li>
<li>We can reply from the relevant account (business, product, personal) depending on the message we’re replying to</li>
<li>We can even enter competitor or complimentor brands, and respond to mentions of those if needed</li>
</ul>
<h2>Recent brand activity</h2>
<p><img src="http://ui.thoughtbot.com/assets/2009-5-14-Picture_3.png" alt="" /></p>
<h2>Free plans</h2>
<p>You can <a href="http://app.thunderthimble.com/users/new">sign up today</a> and check out the product – there’s a even a <span class="caps">FREE</span> plan so that you can take it on a trial run for 30 days before you commit to a paid account.</p>
<h2>Feedback</h2>
<p>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!</p>
<p>We’ve got a <a href="http://getsatisfaction.com/thoughtbot/products/thoughtbot_thunder_thimble">getsatisfaction</a> 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.</p>
