• Ability to switch between Google and Microsoft maps.  Some locations are more current with one map versus the other.
• Ability to switch to Microsoft 3D view of the current location if Virtual Earth 3D is installed (also in beta)
• Even if you don’t know the address or your address isn’t found, you can use your mouse to place a marker on the map to identify your location.
• Not only will the application return the closest meeting locations, congregations and times, but it will provide a local contact name and number if you have questions.

I noticed a few bugs switching between maps, particularly when my connection was running slow, but for a beta launch it looks very promising!

With thousands of people affected by the Sichuan, China earthquake, Google China staff members rolled up their sleeves and joined other rescue organizations.

At the request of the government, we obtained new satellite images of Sichuan province (Earth KML) to help them better focus their recovery efforts. We developed and launched a “lost loved one” search based on our Custom Search Engine (CSE). To populate the CSE index, hundreds of Googlers worked around the clock looking through published tables, hospital records, news reports, and community sites. We tuned our Chinese news search, video search, image search, blog search, and oneboxes. We also partnered to build community sites, and launched both homepage promotions and a map-based information page. Google China has an extremely dedicated and passionate team and I am deeply honored to work alongside them.

Google has also set up a donation page so that you can donate directly towards recovery efforts.  Similarly, donations can be made on the LDS Philanthropies donation page for any of the humanitarian projects around the world or using a donation slip at your local congregation.

But what is it good for? There are many, many uses for a GPS and I hope to be able to get into some of them in future posts. But the first thing I did when I bought my GPS was I used it to determine the latitude and longitude of some special places and locations. Using the GPS I recorded the lat/long of the grave sites of my ancestors and added the location data to the genealogical information I already had about them.

Now the lat/long coordinates given by a GPS are on average accurate to about 20 feet. On a good day I’ve gotten the accuracy down to around 8 feet. So armed with the lat/long from my notes and a few digital pictures of the area, any one of my children or grandchildren could easily find the grave site of my great-grandfather. This offers a great way to enable family and friends to find important personal landmarks.

And I don’t believe GPS is going away any time soon. Many industries use GPS as part of their daily operations. Even the new flight control systems in development today will use GPS information as their primary way of knowing where the planes are in the sky.

A GPS is not for everyone. It’s a fun gadget with few uses in your daily routine. But as GPS enabled phones and cameras become commonplace, you will have more opportunities to take advantage of this new type of information.

Between January 1 and May 6, 2008, these volunteers have indexed over 50 million names!  During the entire previous year, 95 million names were indexed.  These are amazing numbers and a testimony to the power of leveraging the strengths of your community.  Keep up the good work!  For anyone interested in participating, they continue to look for volunteers at http://www.familysearchindexing.org.  The data and images collected through FamilySearch indexing are available on the Record Search Web site at http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch.

The Mormons clearly "get" the Internet in some sense (you can chat online with a missionary, for instance), but they appear determined to follow in the footsteps of groups like Bank Julius Baer that have managed to draw widespread attention to confidential documents without managing to have them removed from Wikileaks.

Wikipedia.org entries related to LDS Church doctrine or history are often the target of anti-Mormon commentary, but LDS members and the general public have been good about removing such inaccuracies.  Hopefully there will be some options available for similar action with Wikileaks.

Without using a NFS utility, a person has limited options for adding data to New FamilySearch.  These include manually adding each individual record using the forms on the web site itself, searching for existing or duplicate data which represent the same individual, or uploading a GEDCOM file with this data included.  By synchronizing data using an NFS utility, the selected record in your personal data file will be compared with the data available at NFS.  New online information available can be downloaded and while missing online data can be uploaded to NFS.  Utilities which can synchronize entire files of data will not be available for some time.

The following individuals and organizations are currently listed as Web Service Affiliates with New FamilySearch, suggesting that they are actively working on products or services which will interface with NFS: FamilyPursuit, Generation Maps, Incline Software (Ancestral Quest), Bungee Labs, Bruce Rogers (Kin2Me), Millennia (Legacy Family Tree), Progeny Software, RootsMagic, US FamilyTree, Ohana Software, World Vital Records / Family Link, One Great Family, nGenisis, LLC, RedBugz Software, Living Genealogy, R.C. Martin, Peter Ivie, US Family Tree, Universital, and Walter Sorenson. 

I haven’t heard if any of these companies or individuals are also releasing beta versions of their software, so please post a reply to this post if you happen to know about any beta software that is available which supports the New FamilySearch. 

The content has been reorganized, which should help you find content faster.

FAQs are beginning to populate, so you can find answers to common questions on that tab.

The Events tab now has a page "All Recorded Presentations" which will link to all of the public, recorded presentations. Now you can access all recordings from one place without having to dig through past events.

The Downloads tab has an area for third-party software. Project owners will be given rights to manage their own page for their project. If you have a project that you would like to have posted here, please email devnet@familysearch.org.

We are putting an end to the life of the Basic Client. We will provide how-to articles for using tools like Poster. We may still post the source to the Basic Client on the site, but we will no longer be supporting it.

If you experience any problems with the new site, or find any broken links, please email devnet@familysearch.org.

I have been using PhpGedView for my family genealogy site, which should have new FamilySearch integration with the next major release of the software.  I haven’t been using these APIs yet myself, but I am interested in doing so.

The Catholic Church objects to the Mormon practice of "rebaptism" for two reasons: first because baptism is permanent, and cannot be repeated; second because the "baptism" practiced by Mormons is invalid, since the faithful are not baptized "in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

The Catholic officials quoted here haven’t looked at the exact wording of the LDS baptismal ordinance from D&C 20:73

Having been commissioned of Jesus Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

OK… we have "Holy Ghost" here instead of "Holy Spirit"… but looking the actually wording of the Catholic baptismal prayer from the Catholic Encyclopedia we get…

I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.

Hmmm… if we are concerned with actual wording, the Catholic news source doesn’t even know exact Catholic doctrine, much less LDS doctrine.

… the Vatican had "grave reservations" about the LDS Church’s practice of posthumous baptisms by proxy, a practice in which the names of the deceased are baptized into the LDS faith so that they may be united in the afterlife with LDS families, if they so choose.

The LDS Church has not made a statement yet regarding this issue. 

Church spokesman Mike Otterson said the church may have more to say on the subject later in the week and that LDS officials had not yet made contact with Vatican representatives about the issue.

After having several instances where Jewish individuals have escalated concerns regarding LDS baptism of Jewish holocaust victims (see Deseret News, Dec 19 2006), this could also impact the Church’s relations with other organized religions.