Lost in the hype of the "Social Web" is the fact that the Internet has always been about sharing: Usenet, Email and IRC have been enabling social connections, including citizen journalism, photo sharing, and other features of recent web-based systems. Thimbl demonstrates the potential for integrating classic internet technologies into the Open Web.

On the surface, Thimbl appears to be yet another microblogging service similar to twitter or identi.ca. However, Thimbl is a specialised web-based client for a User Information protocol called Finger. The Finger Protocol was originally developed in the 1970's, and as such is already supported by all existing server platforms.

Thimbl offers no way to "Sign Up." It is up to your own webhost, Internet service-provider or system administrator to provide accounts. Virtually every server on the intenret already has Finger server software available in its software repository. All that is required for any organisation to provide Thimbl accounts is simply to turn their Finger service on. In most cases, this would take the server administator no more than a few minutes, after which all of their users could log in to thimble.net and participate.