Trip Journal now has nearly 300,000 downloads and it’s been quite a journey since we started the current Trip Journal Support Forum. The forum has served us well in staying connected to our growing Trip Journal Community and in providing a forum to ask and answer questions. As we continue to grow, it’s important to us to improve our ability to stay connected with every Trip Journaler and ensure our support provides meaningful discussions. So it’s time to turn it up a notch — to create a more vibrant support community around the Trip Journal conversations that mean the most to you.

We are officially ready to launch the new and improved Trip Journal Community. This means we will ramp down the current Support Forum on February 10th 2011 and replace it with the new community.

Here’s how to join the community:

• From the “Support” menu you’ll find the new Trip Journal Community option. Just click on I’m A Customer to join. Enter your Question, Idea, Problem, or Praise and click continue.
• From anywhere on the Trip Journal website, click the Feedback Widget to fill out the feedback form and view current feedback topics and FAQs.
• From our Facebook Fan Page, click on the Feedback Tab
• And soon you will have access to the Support Community from the Trip Journal app.

When and where we can, we want to give you the right answers when you need them. Our new community will help bring better visibility to your questions, the answers, and the people behind the answers. It will also keep you connected to what is going on with Trip Journal. When you log in, you’ll connect with our Community Manager, Trip Journal employees, and our new Trip Journal Customer Champions. We would also like to expand the self-service support available to you.

Here is what’s in it for you.

Search The Community
The Trip Journal staff and our users are adding to the forum regularly. You can search already existing topics to get the answers you need. Don’t find your topic, add a new one. But if you happen to find an issue similar to your own, you can now let us know the topic is relevant to you and follow the topic. If you like, the new community will notify you when an answer is provided. You’ll also see what are the most popular topics and what’s new.

Ask Your Questions
Just like in the previous Support Forum, you can add your questions about Trip Journal to the community. We’ll continue to offer our official answers and solutions. The difference in the new community is that as a member of the community, you are more than welcome to reply to any posted question and offer your own advise or comments.

Share An Idea
Do you have an idea for our development team. We want to hear about it and create the travel app you want. Our new community can help us work together to make Trip Journal even better. You will have visibility to all the ideas submitted by the Trip Journal community and you can vote to promote ideas as well. The more votes, the more we will know what new features are popular amongst our users. We will look through all your ideas and you can see what ideas we have under consideration or have put into development.

Report A Problem
If you come across a problem in Trip Journal, we want to fix it. Let us know and we can get right on top of sorting it out. You can even include screen captures if you have them so we can see the issue. We realize that many times users come across common problems. Our new community will help highlight these issues so we can put priority on critical problems. It’ll give you a way to see what’s in work by our development team and what’s been solved.

Give Us Some Praise
When we get it right, we’d like to know that too. Let us know what makes you happy about Trip Journal. Just drop us a quick note and share it with the community.

Bringing It All Together
Trip Journal is currently available for iPhone, Android, Symbian, Bada, and Facebook. In some cases, there may be issues that are platform specific. You’ll find these under the Product area of the Community. If you are already a Trip Journal Facebook Fan or Twitter Follower, you’ll also have access to this feedback as well.

Here’s a few more features of the new community:

• Follow Frequently Asked Questions
• Find all our additional support links like step-by-step tutorials
• Subscribe to feedback to hear the latest on topics of interest.

That’s it for now. If you have any questions about the new community, please just let us know.