1. Invite your travel mates and share memories together

Of your facebook friends choose the ones that joined you on the trip. Once they accept your invitation the trip will appear into their account  and each of you can contribute with symbols and stories.

2. Include facebook photos

Besides flickr and picasa photos, you can also add photos from your facebook albums.

3. Easier way to add icons on the map

Just click “Add icon” button, than click somewhere on the map and we suggest you touristic places around that map point.

You can still search for specific icons if none of our suggestions is what you are looking for.

There also many other small changes that makes the Symbolya easier to use. Enjoy the facebook application and follow us on our fan page.

We used to think about Symbolya as targeted mainly to travelers who do not take the time to write a “real” travel blog. But we discovered lately that it can also be a good tool for “hard-core” travel bloggers. And they like to use it as a visual summary of their trips.

Here are two examples: the nice review made by Heather on her travels and the trip of Viajoa to Tenerife (in Romanian).

Route of the trip

Now the route connecting the symbols is shown on the map – one of the most requested features. On the top-right corner of the map there is an option that shows or hides the route, as you prefer. Here is an example – our sailing week in Croatia.

The order of the symbols you can change in edit mode at “My symbols” tab. There you can reorder the symbols by dragging them up and down.

Facebook login

One click registration and login with your Facebook account (via facebook connect) is also available.

If you already have an account and want to login with Facebook you should “merge” the two accounts:

1. Login with the “old” email and password

2. Go to your profile (the link on your name on the top-right corner)

3. Press the big blue “Facebook connect” button at the bottom of the profile form.

The two accounts will be merged – including the trips that you have made in each of the old accounts. Since now on you can login either with facebook connect, either the “usual way” with the email and apssword.

We spend quite a lot of effort in the last few months to integrate the feedback received from our private beta users. Thank you! We are still waiting for feedback (or write us directly). And tell us what symbols you need further on.

Here is a trip that we like very much – this guy who made the world tour by motorbike.

1. Symbolya just got the Code Master award at DevWorld - technical conference in Bucharest. I want to say special thanks to our coders team.

I am happy to see in Romania more and more and events about web and specially about start-ups.  From all the applications presented, I liked best FlairBuilder – a nice tool for software prototypes similar to Balsamiq. They’ve also won the big prize – Congrats!

2. We are working hard to prepare for SeedCamp Ljubljana on Thursday, the 14th of May. 

3. On Friday, Andrei will attend Open Caffee and BarCamp in Ljubljana. 

and last, but not least,

4. We’ve just launched a new cool feature – publish trip to Facebook. I will tell more in an other post.

This is the first international event where Symbolya will be presented. We are very excited and looking forward to meet the mentors and the other teams.

The voting procedure is very simple: you can vote on the web (here) and you can double your vote via twitter. To vote for Symbolya via twitter just sent the following message:

@thenextweb I want to see #symbolya on stage during The Next Web rising Sun startup rally. #startupvote

There are 15 pitches from which the first 3 regarding  number of votes will be on the stage in Amsterdam. Around 900 web experts will be  at the Conference. It’s a big chance for us, and we really want to be there. Voting closes on Wednesda, Apr 8th at noon CET.

Vote here!

Other new features:

Improved the search experience

The new pagination makes symbol browsing a much smoother experience. And the quick full size symbol preview lets you decide easier if that’s “the symbol” you want.

Direct link to photos

Now you can also send your friends a direct link to the photos (with #photos at the end of the map link). You will find it into the Link/Embed window with all the other sharing options.

Watch this movie to find out more about Symbolya: