MyHeritage.com announced Thursday in London and Tel Aviv the release of Family Tree Builder 4.0.  The key improvements of the new version include a map module, a family toolbar with Family Chat™ and extensive support for albums to organize a family’s photos, videos and documents, the company said in a press release.

Gilad Japhet, CEO and Founder of MyHeritage.com, was quoted in the press release:

“With the new map module, people can get an appealing visual representation of their family’s life journeys. They can also map the addresses of family members, quickly find all events and photos associated with a particular place and even standardize place names using smart suggestions. This provides a fascinating new perspective for millions of people interested in their family history.”

MyHeritage said their  new family toolbar provides direct access to family sites on MyHeritage.com, adds  search features and “Family Chat,” – a text, audio and video chat system built specifically for family use. Members also receive useful birthday reminders on the family toolbar without leaving the Web page they are on.

The company’s press release also says that Family Tree Builder 4.0  adds slideshows for showcasing family photos  and a new screen saver that displays family photos based on tagging and face recognition technology.

Family Tree Builder 4.0 is free to download [http://www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder?affid=pre01].  MyHeritage says that there have been more than 5 million downloads of the software to date.

MyHeritage.com is available in 34 languages, is home to more than 33 million family members and hosts profiles of 360 million people.

For more information, visit www.myheritage.com or http://www.myheritage.com/family-tree-builder

Comment: This sounds very interesting.  I particularly have been interested in mapping functions in genealogical software. I’ll try it out and report soon.