16 ms·

Why Bother with What Three Words?

• titanix2 8y ago
  I’ve assisted to a speech/demonstration by an employee in my lab and while the system was nice in principe the non-openess and internationalization let me a meh impression. It is used in Mongolia by the country post so it addresses a real problem but concerns rising in the blog post are real.
• vr46 8y ago
  I had never heard of this until I read the criticism, maybe this is some kind of corollary to the Streisand Effect. Also, it looks right up there with Swatch Internet Time.
  • duxup 8y ago
    I thought of Swatch Internet Time too ... Swatch Internet Time was pretty silly, although I appreciated it for that. This other thing seems more opportunistic / financially motivated / kinda scummy too. I also wonder about the Streisand Effect here, never heard of it until now. This almost seems like standards geek / nerd bait...
  • mirimir 8y ago
    I have a hard time believing that W3W isn't an early April Fools joke. I mean, seriously? And why three words? You only need two, unless you're coding altitude. And damn, you already have two numbers (angles) with arbitrary precision. And how does one calculate great-circle distances using their silly words?
    • NikkiA 8y ago
      The 3 words are because 2 words doesn't give you enough bits of enumerated data. The words aren't to be thought of as X,Y,Z, they're just 3 blobs of bits, where each word represents something like a 0-200,000 range or something.
      • mirimir 8y ago
        Huh? Maybe not two short words. But clearly, two numbers can be represented by two words.
        • teach 8y ago
          Are you talking about existing English words? I'm not sure there are enough longer words for this to be possible, depending on the range of numbers being encoded.
          • mirimir 8y ago
            No, I wasn't. Sorry, I just don't get the point. Implementing a bunch of proprietary location-encoding schemes is just insane. I do see the profit motive, obviously. But I can only hope that people will avoid using stuff like this. Maybe if it were totally open-source. And if it were implemented by some recognized international entity. Maybe some part of the UN.
        • maxerickson 8y ago
          How many bits do you think it takes to precisely indicate a location on the surface of the earth? If you are using 2 angles, I guess the place to start is with the circumference of the earth, which is 40 million meters. So to get within a meter, you then need to encode your angle with enough precision to indicate a single one of the 40 million possibilities.
          • mirimir 8y ago
            Ummm. That's what latitude and longitude are. Angles. Or equivalently, radians. And what's magic about one meter? Latitude and longitude can be arbitrarily precise. But whatever. You want 40 million? Well, 360 degrees / 40 million ~ 10^-5. That's easily handled by "43.63872, -116.24135".
            • maxerickson 8y ago
              Yes, it seemed you were arguing those two numbers could easily be encoded using existing words. If you want to make gibberish word like objects it's probably possible.
  • aschneid 8y ago
    The only reason I had heard of it was because my car has it built into the navigation system. So, I can enter a W3W coordinate and my car will appropriately route me. It's supposedly beneficial when trying to locate a particular person. They can just send you their W3W, the car can read it off the SMS, and automatically provide routing. I have not used the capability, but explored it when I first got the car since I had never heard of W3W.
• gowld 8y ago
  Google Plus is dead. Long live Plus Codes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code
• manishsharan 8y ago
  I am not familiar with this company but I find what they are doing almost as funny as the Indiana Pi Bill . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
• jpatokal 8y ago
  There are plenty of alternatives to W3W, most notably Open Location Codes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code Alternatively, try a W3W parody: https://what3emojis.com/ https://what3emojis.com/ http://www.what3fucks.com http://www.what3fucks.com (NSFW text)
  • rakoo 8y ago
    Out of interest here's a list of alternatives and why they're worse than plus codes: https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...
    • slavik81 8y ago
      MGRS and UTM are missing from these comparisons. They're commonly used systems in North America and exist for easier human reasoning and communication about coordinates, so they'd be good to include.
  • ajuc 8y ago
    The emojis one have the nice property that close addresses share some words.
    • kps 8y ago
      As usual, the parody is strictly superior to the original.
      • DoreenMichele 8y ago
        The secret to Weird Al's success.
    • aembleton 8y ago
      And the emoji one will work across languages.
• velcrovan 8y ago
  There is another big problem with W3W that Terence doesn’t mention: it isn’t scalar. From another W3W-criticism blog post (https://mwfrost.com/space-is-scalar.html https://mwfrost.com/space-is-scalar.html): “An addressing system is successful insofar as it enables us to execute the suite of cognitive tasks that constitute navigation. Associating a destination with its location on the earth is only one of these chores. “If you have a powerful computer in your pocket, and you want to use your brain to remember and then use your voice or a text message to share a geographic location with someone else who also has a powerful pocket computer, what3words has got you covered. If you want to infer how far that location is from another location, or which roads might connect to it, you are out of luck. Building an addressing system is difficult, expensive work specifically because legitimate addresses embed so many levels of hierarchical categories and scalar proportions for us. Remembering coordinate locations is cognitively burdensome, but the signifiers retain some meaning relative to one another. You can tell the search and rescue team that you’ve twisted your ankle at ringleader.kilt.comedians, but as soon as you’ve moved 3 meters east, you’re at since.duplicates.backswing, and the technologically-enhanced mnemonic crutch has exhausted its usefulness. Augmenting one cognitive task in a manner that debilitates the constellation of surrounding faculties is not the right way to apply technology to our problems.”
  • hopler 8y ago
    I don't see the relevance of that complaint. People don't memorize their current lat long to 16 sig figs either. You'd still need a gps device or a paper map without w3w.
    • enticeing 8y ago
      I think the point is that ringleader.kilt.comedians and since.duplicated.backswing have no relation at all to each other, and don't communicate to the user their spatial relationship. On the other hand, you could infer that 1234 W Something Rd is nearby 1238 W Something Rd. EDIT: Also, given a set of lat/long coordinates, regardless of the precision, you could infer their spatial relationship as well.
      • 8y ago
• daedlanth 8y ago
  Aaah, no. Thanks.
• timthorn 8y ago
  > Here's the thing... If the person's phone has a data connection - the web page can just send the geolocation directly back to the emergency services! No need even for the data connection. Any Android 2.3.7+ or iOS 11.3+ phone will automatically SMS the location when the emergency number is dialled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mobile_Location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mobile_Location
  • imglorp 8y ago
    There's also a ton of E911 infrastructure already for exactly this problem (USA, your number may vary!). It's not done at the user level and certainly not by a third party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• vortico 8y ago
  Does anyone have a list of patents What3Words has? Regardless, this service solves a problem that does not exist whatsoever. My guess is they will go out of business in a few years.
  • runn1ng 8y ago
    It does exist in developing nations, where street names change very quickly and are not very reliable (and the rusty government can't keep up with the quick development). First hand experience, Vietnam - I currently live in a street that wasn't there a year ago and isn't in Google Maps. If you put it into Google, it will send you to another place, 200 meters away. (They are getting better fast, compared to Apple Maps for example which suck hilariously, but still isn't perfect.) You can share a long/lat, or a link to Google Maps, but that's hard to write down. So it's a problem.
    • hopler 8y ago
      W3W doesn't solve that problem in a way that makes any sense. Things like Plus Codes do
    • intertextuality 8y ago
      That's what Plus Codes appear to be aimed at. And it's open source. https://plus.codes/ https://plus.codes/
• asow92 8y ago
  Why don't you just make an open alternative is this is so disconcerting to you?
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • asow92 8y ago
    Sure downvote me for asking you to be accountable for your dispositions.
    • rtkwe 8y ago
      Here's the thing 'if you have problems with it build your own' is a useless response. Anyone can totally point out issues with a thing without knowing how to fix them (especially if the concept is fundamentally flawed). Expecting people to go out and found a whole standard/business every time they make a blog post about the problems with something is ridiculous.
      • melq 8y ago
        And further, just because you find something to be harmful doesn't mean you have any motivation to replace or fix it. I don't like Facebook, but I certainly don't have any interest in writing my own open sourced Facebook.
      • asow92 8y ago
        We're a community of builders, makers, and entrepreneurs. If we aren't here to fix the issues we see in the world, what are we doing? All I'm saying is if OP truly feels the way they do, they should try to be the change they wish to see in the world. Especially since what w3w is doing isn't technically complicated.
        • qntty 8y ago
          I have lots of complains about the world, and only so many hours in the day.
• toss1 8y ago
  "superficially simple solution to a complex problems" --- Exactly this While it might initially seem a bit easier to remember words vs numbers, W3W is a non-solution in many ways, many nicely described in the article. Most critically, the W3W indicators have zero relation to actual geography. Adjacent locations have entirely different quasi-random identifiers -- there is no progressive gradation, and no indication whether two locations are adjacent or on different continents. It does not scale, and leaves us completely dependent on a data connection and their servers to navigate. There is also no way to figure it out from known principles. The entire system has many points of failure. With a street address, I can know which way to from seeing a couple of existing addresses; W3W - no way, need a data connection. With Lat-Long I immediately know what part of the world I'm in, and what direction I need to move to move to get closer to my target. A GPS unit, or a simple compass and map will work great. W3W -- zero clues, and need a data connection to them. Horrible, non-scalable, non-solution looking for a problem. Massive marketing attempting to overcome bad technology.
• kowdermeister 8y ago
  Our office location had a square named: [boom,bedroom,gagging]
  • nuklearwanze 8y ago
    I guess that's exactly what they are after: funny (or otherwise "engaging") three word combinations that are: (a) easy to remember, and (b) promote their service. - the default square when looking up the town i live in is leber.abhilfe.schnell (german), translated "liver, relief, quick", so maybe that's what their algorithm is optimized for? Either way, the whole system seems pretty stupid: why 3x3m (way to high res for normal street addresses, much to coarse for anything else)? what is the problem supposed to be that W3W wants to solve? I sure dont see it... location data is usually not shared verbally but sent via some kind of text medium - you just send GPS-coordinates from another (map-)app directly through your email/messaging-app. seems simple enough.
    • Anderkent 8y ago
      >location data is usually not shared verbally but sent via some kind of text medium - you just send GPS-coordinates from another (map-)app directly through your email/messaging-app. seems simple enough. So in one setting I have to email myself a link to get the map on another device. In the other I just type three words from one screen into my phone. I wonder which one's more convenient.
      • aembleton 8y ago
        you could scan a QR code from your phone
        • Anderkent 8y ago
          That also seems more effort than typing three words to me TBH, but I guess there YMMV
• NikkiA 8y ago
  On top of those reasons.... It's already a long-ago solved problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System
  • darkstar999 8y ago
    To be fair, W3W and similar projects have a lot more friendly and memorable addresses than this.
• eruci 8y ago
  I've built an open source alternative, 3geonames.org. The code is made up of 3 Geonames, with the first Geoname being the most prominent location name in relation to actual geography, for eg: https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA . The 140k Geonames have a phonetic distance of at least 1 from each other. Support for elevation and an app with voice geocoding is coming soon.
  • aembleton 8y ago
    Interesting. Tried the middle of Manchester and it gave me a location starting with Leeds: https://3geonames.org/LEEDS-RAGI-USANA https://3geonames.org/LEEDS-RAGI-USANA
    • eruci 8y ago
      That's because a) Polygons are quite large (over 20k square kilometres) b) Manchester is a long name (I limit geoname length whenever possible), c) Manchester is possibly similar sounding to another big city name.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • feb 8y ago
    A few weeks ago, I hoped 3geonames could become a standard. But it has some painful limitations: The system picks very unusual names. For example STOCARDA-KRRABA-SIPLA is in Germany, but doesn't use the German name of the city. (For those wondering, Stocarda means Stuttgart in Venetian according to Wikipedia.) That makes it harder to use for locals and can hurt the feelings of people in some regions. Also using cities of other countries can cause controversial codes, especially for young and or small countries. 3geonames has to use a language for each name. This makes it hard for people who don't speak that language to pronounce the words. The 3geonames website describes the basic principles but there's no detailed description on how to build those codes besides (a somewhat hard to read) Perl script. For example, the documentation does not explain what encoding is used exactly.
• zerogvt 8y ago
  That -apart from being a brilliant idea- seems to be easy to replicate in open source software. Replicate not in being compatible but as a different system altogether. Or has that already happened?
  • eruci 8y ago
    Yes. I've built one of them. https://3geonames.org https://3geonames.org . Open source. Works offline. No database is needed. Based on geonames.org. I also know of at least 2 other open source alternatives (what3ducks and what3fucks).
    • mcguire 8y ago
      It's weird that I'd never heard of this before, but there seems to be a vibrant community of parodies.
      • eruci 8y ago
        I think it is an important problem since it has gotten the attention that it has.
  • simias 8y ago
    The added value here seems to be the curated, per-language word list. You'd have to be careful with homophones, they say that they use simpler, more common words for populated locations (and locations where the target language is more used) etc... After playing a bit with their interface I can't really tell if they're successful but it does seem like it would be relatively complicated to come up with such a word list in many languages. That being said, it could probably be crowdsourced.
• jillesvangurp 8y ago
  W3w was a pretty nice idea and I know some people that have been involved with the company. However, it is indeed not open. It's also VC funded which means that openness is incompatible with making money for them. Which means that most of its potential is lost or off limits unless you are a paying customer. They have a few of those and have had some success doing deals with postal services in countries that lack formal addresses or for use cases where formal addresses are not that useful, like e.g. logistics or big public venues like airports. But the closed nature of this of course holds back most of the interesting use-cases. For those who don't know, w3w simply encodes locations to 3 words using an algorithm that translates coordinates into what is probably a quad tree path (e.g. geohash) and breaks that into 3 chunks that get mapped to words. The proprietary part is the algorithm and the mapping of words to these chunks (mappings actually since they have them in several languages). Probably you could reverse engineer the algorithm but then you run into the little problem that the mapping is likely copyrighted, some patents may apply, etc. There are some nice touches to the algorithm like e.g. associating shorter/common words with the most relevant locations so that if you are German speaking, the German version of the algorithm generates short codes inside Germany and longer ones on the other side of the planet. A couple of issues with w3w: the codes are not hierarchical. So you can't rely on e.g. the first word denoting a bigger location; the second word denoting locations inside that area, etc. Consequently, two almost identical locations will have completely different words associated with them. So you can't at a glance tell where any combination of words is unless you run the algorithm. They are easy to remember but meaningless. Open location codes and Geohashes are similar except they don't provide easy to remember human readable codes, which is the reason why neither is commonly used by consumers. However, I've always liked geohashes because things with the same prefix are in the same place, which is awesome if you need to build search engines (though more efficient ways of doing that are available). With 7 or 8 letters you get pretty good accuracy with those and the algorithm for encoding and decoding is pretty simple. OLC is similar but stays closer to the degrees/minuts/seconds notion. Also the codes are longer.
  • 0xffff2 8y ago
    >(though more efficient ways of doing that are available) Would you mind expanding on that? This topic piqued my interest because I've recently found myself using Geohashes to lookup nearby objects and I'm wondering if there's something better that I should be doing.
• manifestsilence 8y ago
  This idea of mapping words over an information space seems to be floating about quite a bit in recent years. I was inspired by the XKCD about the superiority of passphrases (Correct Horse Battery Staple) and have thought of a handful of other applications that are more relevant than GPS location for word mapping. It's the wrong application of a generally great (but not novel) idea.
• faho 8y ago
  One clarification, as a native german speaker: >Or ///klartext.bestückt.vermuten - "cleartext stocked suspect"? That's "suspect" in the sense of "guess" (as a verb), not in the sense of a criminal suspect. (And "stocked" like a store shelf would be) I'd call this example entirely benign.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• adambyrtek 8y ago
  I inherited a property management system where previous developers used what3words for storing location of homes (since reverse geocoding based on address is not reliable in some countries we support). However, after an internal review we realised that a lot of our UK properties have locations in Asia or the US... It turned out that typos in what3words often result in a valid location on the other side of the world. The most common mistakes we found were plural words instead of singular ones (e.g. "cats" not "cat") or the other way around. Of course we could have improved the user interface or added some extra validations, but at this point we realised that what3words is more trouble than it's worth, and decided to migrate to storing lat/long directly. That allowed us to avoid a third-party dependency and simplify the code, since we had to cache lat/long anyway in order to plot properties on a map or calculate distances between them.
  • mcguire 8y ago
    ...in which we learn that the previous developers hated everyone.
  • Angostura 8y ago
    I imagine that a single digit typo in latitude could also result in a valid location on the other side of the world
    • Scarblac 8y ago
      But bounds checking is a lot simpler.
    • notahacker 8y ago
      Sure, but none of the numbers are homophones or even particularly easy to confuse (in English, anyway) when giving a location verbally. W3W marketing claims none of their words are either, but the evidence suggests otherwise... Latitude errors are also much easier to correct if you incorrectly memorise it but know other information (country/city). But if you find out that arbitrary.word.cat gives you an obviously incorrect location, you've got very little chance of realising that actually it must have been arbitrary.world.cats
• jasonhansel 8y ago
  Idea: phones could have a feature to send your location as a series of DTMF tones. If standardized, that would be great for any service that needs your location.
• mchannon 8y ago
  W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before figuring out if you can afford their service. I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W: •Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on extras. A 12-character code with the last two lopped off will be imperceptibly close to the original. •Precision optimized. Every additional character, no matter the value, will result in a location not identical to the absence of that character. •Precision-focused. When a location is precise to the nearest 100km, km, m, or µm, the browser tools make that clear. •Logic-optimized. With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character. •Spheroid-optimized. The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use. Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is 38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes. Watch this space.
  • estomagordo 8y ago
    So your solution won't result in "coordinates" easily memorized by humans or easily translated to the very vast majority of map implementations?
    • mchannon 8y ago
      Not sure how you got that from what I typed. The fact is the 4 coordinates (two numeric, two with the stupid "N/S/E/W" corresponding with traditional), decimal points, and reverse order from an X,Y coordinate system, are hardly easy to memorize. They're next to impossible to memorize. What part of pencil and paper didn't come across?
      • StavrosK 8y ago
        Because, from what you've described, it sounds like your system will look like base64-encoded coordinates. Ie 39.022874, 21.913384 will be IJASDO, which isn't as easy to memorize as W3W.
• jccalhoun 8y ago
  Mostly off topic: I would like a URL shortener that uses a similar system so that instead of giving me small.url/b3DmQ it would be small.url/MouseHatDoor because I will sometimes share a link with my students and there is always one student who can't get it to work because they type it wrong or something. I can send them the link through a course announcement but it is more convenient to put a short url on screen and have them go there.
  • tzs 8y ago
    Might it be easier to have a web page that has a chronological or reverse chronological clickable list of links you want to give your students? Then instead of sending them a shortened link to something, you just put the link on your page and tell them there's a new link for them there. That would also make it easy for students who want to go back and review older links you sent. Instead of digging through prior announcements to find the right one, they could just go to your links page.
  • HALtheWise 8y ago
    http://yellkey.com http://yellkey.com is designed for exactly this use case, and is near-exact clone of the now defunct http://shoutkey.com http://shoutkey.com that was prevalent at our school for this. It provides single-word short URLs that expire after 24 hours, which is fine in practice for any in-person use case.
    • jccalhoun 8y ago
      nice. I have looked for url shorteners but didn't find this one. thanks!
  • SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    bit.ly generates a random string by default but will let you override it with the wording of your choice (as long as it's available).
    • jccalhoun 8y ago
      I will do that if I plan ahead but often I will generate it on the spot so I don't bother since bit.ly wants you to log in to customize urls.
• screentearer 8y ago
  This strategy of for-profit companies masquerading as open-source advocates is really common in science as well. For instance, based on advertising from the ACS (American Chemical Society, the largest scientific organization in the world by membership), you would expect they are advocates of collaboration among chemists. In reality they will sue anyone that tries to store or distribute their standard for chemical identifier numbers (CAS#).
• beagle3 8y ago
  With respect to the word list being non-language-neutral, possibly offensive, etc - there was an old Mnemonic encoding project, the original gone but many other mirrors (e.g. https://powershellexplained.com/2017-03-25-mnemonic-wordlist/ https://powershellexplained.com/2017-03-25-mnemonic-wordlist... ) which is essentially perfect for these kinds of encodings. It's not a standard, but it should be.
• nsxwolf 8y ago
  Lost me at "The world is a sphere"
  • ungzd 8y ago
    1) It has link to "Oblate spheroid". 2) On Google Maps and almost all other popular maps on the web, Earth is a sphere, see EPSG:3857
    • slavik81 8y ago
      Of course, the Earth is not really an oblate spheroid, either. That's just a slightly more accurate approximation than a sphere. A quick look out the window reveals that the Earth is bumpy, covered in valleys, hills and mountains that are not included in the ellipsoid description. As they say, "all models are wrong, but some are useful." The trick is to choose the simplest model that works. The right one to use depends on what you're using it for.
• FrozenVoid 8y ago
  I was reading on w3w in 2017 and thought its better expressed as syllables instead of arbitrary wordlists: http://void.wikidot.com/methods:4syllable-locations http://void.wikidot.com/methods:4syllable-locations
• thelittlenag 8y ago
  The startup I'm working with offers a much better solution. We call it a geohash phrase. Instead of three random words, where plurals and order matter, instead we map geohashs to 5-word tuples that easily form a phrase. Moreover, the words will only ever appear in one slot of the tuple, and pluralization and word order don't matter. You can find more at our website: qalocate.com
• winter_blue 8y ago
  What are some better (more open, reliable) alternatives to sharing latitude/longitude-based locations? (Note: I'd never heard of What 3 Words before coming across this post.)
• newaccoutnas 8y ago
  All you need is https://what3emojis.com https://what3emojis.com
  • testplzignore 8y ago
    > If you are unhappy with the emoji you are assigned you can reserve custom emoji markers for your triangle for only a low, lifetime price of $24.99.* Custom emoji can be any length (except three), up to the VARCHAR limit set in our MySQL database. Awesome.
• HenryBemis 8y ago
  42 Acacia Avenue? I take it that Terence wanted to write 22, but was afraid of Iron Maiden's lawyers? :)
• rodw 8y ago
  W3W feels a lot like Swatch .beats [1]. It's not exactly solving a problem the doesn't exist, but I think solution is at least as bad as the problem we started with. At least .beats had the excuse of being a marketing gimmick, or so I assume. No one really thought millidays-since-midnight-GMT was a reasonable alternative to time-zones or just UTC time, right? What is the problem that W3W is intended to solve? The idea is that I'll describe a location via W3W coordinates rather than by address (or lat/lon)? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• chengiz 8y ago
  What Three Words always seemed like a stupid idea to me. Not much thinking beyond: Locations need bits, English words have bits, Let's use one for the other. Addresses already work. Cellphones have GPS. It seems like an idea for a problem that doesnt exist. What next, mapping words to phone numbers?
• pickled_onion 8y ago
  I once thought about W3W like a DNS. Registered companies and businesses could purchase a "number plate" e.g. "jakes.superior.plumbing" and then keep that number plate on a subscription basis, much like owning a domain name. If the business moved address, the geographic coordinates could be updated in the back-end so that "jakes.superior.plumbing" always resolved to the correct location. This, I thought, would be a great monetization strategy and beneficial to many businesses. Even for folks who live in e.g. Dubai or rural areas where there there has been no proper addressing strategy from the municipal side, to be able to purchase a "name" of 3 words or whatever, in order to be found easily - would be hugely beneficial. Furthermore, instead of the 3 words being hard-coded to a specific cell on a world-grid, you take the name with you. If you move house, or move business, just change the coordinates and keep the name. I did mention this to W3W management when I spoke with them in past dealings; they brushed the idea off as useless because they didn't have the means or capacity to maintain a changing directory of names/coordinates. Or perhaps they just thought my idea was silly compared to their approach of dividing the world into trillions of cells and giving each cell an identifier.
• rurp 8y ago
  The US (as well as other countries) has had a grid mapping system for hundreds of years[0]. It's just way less useful than GPS. The only time I've seen PLSS used over GPS is for legacy reasons. [0] Public Land Survey System https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/a_plss.html https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/a_plss.html
• xondono 8y ago
  Maybe it’s because english is not my native language but, how does it do with spelling? Are now-sphere-dew and now-sphere-due two distinct locations? Are they at least close enough?
  • improbable22 8y ago
    I think they are likely to be both valid, but are deliberately far apart. So you don't get a checksum; perhaps if you are typing your own address in and are shown a map you will wonder why it's showing Timbuktu... but if someone else's address is in the middle of Siberia you won't know how to correct it.
• hartator 8y ago
  To be fair, I haven’t heard about W3W until this post.
  • glonq 8y ago
    Ditto, and I've worked with GIS for over a decade. Heard of plus codes, though. Which is definitely what I'll use if/when I need something more human-friendly than lat&lon.
• chris_overseas 8y ago
  I agree with the author that using W3W for locating people in trouble is ludicrous, yet it appears to be real: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912
  • adblair 8y ago
    Can anyone suggest why the Advanced Mobile Location system discussed above wasn't used in this situation?
• RocketSyntax 8y ago
  this is an april fools joke, right?
• skywhopper 8y ago
  I'd never heard of this place, but based on the staffing ratios in evidence on their "team" page (https://what3words.com/team/ https://what3words.com/team/), the vast majority of the company is in "partnerships", "growth", "business development", and "marketing".
• coldtea 8y ago
  First of all, WTW seems like a BS solution in search of a problem that wont go anywhere, anyway. So I don't see a reason not only to bother with them, but even to be bothered by what they do. Even if needed, this is much better: https://plus.codes/ https://plus.codes/ Second, a nit: "Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.". Not "any tectonic activity" but the rare tectonic activity that keeps your house number the same but changes your long/lat. Third, another nit: "Numbers are fairly universal. Lots of countries use 0-9. English words are not universal. How does W3W deal with this?" They don't have to? Domain names are not universal either (even when they added unicode after tons of years it has near zero adoption, plus implementation issues in many browsers/client libs. Heck still today Chrome shows the Poopla domain as mere punycode: https://xn--ls8h.la/ https://xn--ls8h.la/)
• scythe 8y ago
  Isn't the algorithm for this trivial? Convert the lat-long to a single number by Z-order (Hilbert curve if you like pain), optionally use xor and bit-rotations (which are both bijective) to scramble it, then divide it into chunks and lookup in a dictionary. How do you sell that to an investor who knows how to code? (It can be made hierarchical, just chunk the lat-long first!) (Just clean the dictionary of any homonyms!) (You can get error correction by XORing the three word indexes together to generate a check word!)
• stuart78 8y ago
  W3W seems to me like it adds more confusion to finding places than it adds clarity. The word choices involve tenses and plurals, which makes them seem quite east to get wrong from memory. This is exhibited in two of the carousels on their homepage: * actors.asking.print * manage.mercy.items Both plural nouns could easily be confused for the singular form, and when I was typing the above, I in fact mixed it up on items. I think the advantage of lat/long and plus codes is that they are more obscure. They don't make the odd promise of being memorable. With W3W codes, are we supposed to remember more than one of these? I know the addresses of my parents and a few friends, but rely on mechanical storage for all others. I understand the advantage of having a more universal way of identifying precise locations, but don't see cute password-like names as a helpful solution to that. Let computers do what computers do well. which is store and quickly serve up inscrutable bits of information.
  • bradknowles 8y ago
    They should be using something like the EFF's word lists: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-passphrases https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...
  • Stratoscope 8y ago
    > The word choices involve tenses and plurals, which makes them seem quite east to get wrong from memory. [emphasis added] A delightful and no doubt unintentional example of a problem very similar to what you're talking about!
• benatkin 8y ago
  Wow, the entrance to the coffee shop I'm currently sitting in is "anyone mock grid". So I guess anyone can make fun of their grid? :D https://map.what3words.com/anyone.mock.grid https://map.what3words.com/anyone.mock.grid
• LeoPanthera 8y ago
  I have always wondered why the Maidenhead Locator System did not catch on outside of Amateur Radio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System It converts geographic positions into short strings of characters, but notably, a truncated string still points to the same location, just less precisely. For example, the ferry building in San Francisco is CM87TT20, but CM87TT is a larger square that encompasses Treasure Island as well, and CM87 is most of the bay area.
  • improbable22 8y ago
    Indeed it seems neat. And you will learn to ignore CM87 the way you (used to) ignore phone area codes. Although it looks like CM87tt20 only gets you within a km or so, does CM87tt20aa get you down to a building?
    • LeoPanthera 8y ago
      Yes. Less than a building, in fact. CM87TT20SV is the front entrance.
• car 8y ago
  This reminds me of RealNames(.)com. To their excuse, this was back in the crazy Internet days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames
• iheartpotatoes 8y ago
  I love tech startups: Longitude and lattitude have worked fine for centuries (well, ever since clocks became reliable enough, that is!). So let's... disrupt it? ...with something less intuitive? ...and proprietary? Typical VC mentality! Shut these jokers down.
• turc1656 8y ago
  The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to 51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system. However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if they are 1,0000 miles apart. If anything, they should have designed it such that it follows an IP style system where you get more precise/specific with each period and the words more to the left indicate a larger area and we drill down to other smaller areas with each period. And you could make words in the specific section be similar to things that are near it. For example, it could roughly translate to state.town.subsection within a country. So mouth.award.bowl could be right next to mouth.award.cup because cup and bowl are related. Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap?
  • foxylad 8y ago
    Agree with your main issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code solves this quite nicely, and also the OP's issue of W3W being non-free.
  • DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap? From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of Mongolia. I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question. I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very insightful. I have a (useless -- er, unused) Certificate in GIS and still enjoy reading about map stuff.
    • turc1656 8y ago
      Thank you. I know you weren't arguing. And it wasn't rhetorical - I really did want to know who uses it because I've never heard of it. Thanks for the info.
• make3 8y ago
  the weepy.lulls.emerge thing is really terrible
• cyode 8y ago
  When I first learned about W3W, I immediately wondered if this same process of mapping n-word tuples across a discrete space could be applied to time. Similar to GPS coordinates, Unix timestamps like 1293432531 don't communicate much to a human developer about when in history they occur. Just use 2010-12-26 22:48:51 then, right? Sure, but then my brain has to worry about timezones, DST, etc. I feel like a unique English name for each second could be useful in some cases, like 1293432531 but (easier, to, pronounce). Of course a lot of the shortcomings about W3W would apply to to this system too (offensive phrases, lack of relation between nearby points, etc.) Anyone know of something, open source or otherwise, that exists?
• tgsovlerkhgsel 8y ago
  There are so many competing systems because the problem of turning two numbers (a coordinate pair) into a string is trivial, so everyone comes up with their own bikeshed. The individual details of the systems don't really matter. Sure, they each have some small advantage or disadvantage, and you can argue about them for a long time, but in the end, what matters is usage/adoption. A widespread but suboptimal system is better than a system with better properties that few people know/use, because the differences barely matter. Unfortunately, there isn't sufficient need for such a system that ordinary people would regularly come into contact with it, and any group of people that does have such a need already found a (proprietary) solution, so it's unlikely we'll get a standard soon unless big players agree on one and aggressively push for it.
• doctorRetro 8y ago
  So W3W is effectively domains for lat/lon and/or street addresses. This feels like an idea trying desperately to justify it's existence. Or to paraphrase, the answer to a question no one asked. Reviewing the critiques of this concept only seem to reinforce that.
• TimTheTinker 8y ago
  I work for Esri, a pretty large GIS company. From where I sit, I think W3W's idea could be implemented better in less than a week, and then plugged into existing GIS workflows as needed. I suspect some large company or consortium like OGC will eventually build something similar using a geographic coordinate system like WGS84 instead of Mercator, and release it as an open database (perhaps with an open API and an open-source reference implementation). At that point W3W would only continue operating because of vendor lock-in to their proprietary named grid cell database. (Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. I don't speak for my employer.)
• EGreg 8y ago
  I was friends with this kid and I will associate Three Words with him instead! https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-bao-meet-the-18-year-old-entrepreneur-behind-threewords-me/amp/ https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-b...
• AcerbicZero 8y ago
  So this is a worse implementation of the German Navel Grid System, taken a few layers deeper, and without the contextual value of an actual grid? Looks like Lat/Long win again.
• talking_panda 8y ago
  Oh interesting I just got to know about w3w from this post. I agree with the criticisms about it not being an open standard. But the idea sounds interesting. I won't be using it anytime soon, but I can see it can be useful to Ron Swanson who hides his gold arbitrarily under trees in forest. :)
• ltbarcly3 8y ago
  There is so much "righteous indignation" in this thread! I get that this Three Words thing might not be perfect, but a lot of the criticisms in the posting are nonsense. The furthest anything moved in the Japan earthquake was around 2.5 meters. Why act like this is some kind of deal breaker? If you had used latitude and longitude it would still be wrong by 2.5 meters if you didn't update it after the quake. Some people had an idea, built it out, and everyone here is losing their minds, I don't get it?
  • rtkwe 8y ago
    2.5 meters is a problem in W3W. The squares are 3mx3m so most things are going to change "location." Combine that with the nonlocality of the W3W encoding and suddenly anything used has a completely different 'address' where with traditional latitude and longitude 2.5 meters doesn't drastically change.
    • ltbarcly3 8y ago
      So you just keep using the old address code or words or whatever, I really don't understand why this is a problem. What is going to happen if people come looking for you and you are 2.5 meters to the left of where they show up? Your original geolocation is almost certainly less accurate than 2.5 meters to begin with, no matter how you specify it. Add to that the fact that if it's a physical location with geographical extent, like say a building that is more than 5 feet across, you are arbitrarily picking your location from within all the possible locations that fall inside that building.
• _kst_ 8y ago
  "If we, what3words ltd, are ever unable to maintain the what3words technology ..., then we will release our source code into the public domain. We will do this in such a way and with suitable licences ..." What are "suitable licences" for the public domain?
• daveheq 8y ago
  This is the first time I've heard of this and I don't know why people would use it... there's no pattern to the word-locations; at least a grid has a pattern.
• car 8y ago
  Another blast from the past: the SRI dotgeo initiative, ca. 2000: http://www.ai.sri.com/dotgeo/ http://www.ai.sri.com/dotgeo/ They proposed cuteness like this: Default Brand Name (short for "default cell server brand name"): the special brand name, such as "mercury," "venus," "earth," "moon," "mars," that denotes the default GeoRegistry for a planet. Other cell server brand names always refer to the planet Earth.
• Kiro 8y ago
  All these ideas are doomed to fail. No-one will ever use them.
• huffmsa 8y ago
  I'm trying to understand it, but I can't. Latitude and longitude can be used without an internet connection if you can get a GPS signal. If you're a boy scout or doomsday prepper or 1800s explorer who fell through a wormhole, and have a bit of time, you can use the sun, stars and a makeshift compass to get a good ballpark. It's a system which only requires you and your counterpart to both accept the contract of the coordinate system. As many others here have pointed out fuzzy.enlarged.testicles doesn't mean anything unless we both have access to W3W, and then the directions which come from me needing to get from hairy.baked.potato to you at fuzzy.enlarged.testicles uses GPS. Because giving someone a print out of all the W3W plots they need to pass through is useless, because those phrases don't mean anything, because the system isn't contiguous or addressable. It'd be like every house on a street having a different, non-contiguous number, different name and different postal code (134 wallaby 53217 next to 5678 futon 44444). Or for the Londoners, if the postal districts didn't increase as you moved outward. It's a bad design with too many assumptions.
  • huffmsa 8y ago
    Or for you mathamatican, it's as if every square on a Cartesian plane had some arbitrary value assigned to it.
• mc_lovin_ 8y ago
  How w3w solves the emergency problem ? In case of an emergency you go to a link and read out your location. If the gps is enabled shouldn't the location of the person in need be automatically logged when he opens the link ? Why should he even say the name of the location ?
• aagha 8y ago
  I've always thought that one of the ways to stop such stupid ideas/companies is to follow the money and potentially black-list the VC's that are helping to propagate a bad idea. Digging into this on Crunchbase, it turns out that some of the funders behind W3W are HUGE names[0,1]: * Intel * Daimler * Sony To me, this lends credence to the idea that many investors are either just in it for the money--despite what their mission statements say, or just plane stupid. 0 - https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/organizations/num_investors/what3words https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/... 1 - https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/organizations/num_lead_investors/what3words https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/...
• nojvek 8y ago
  Yeah what 3 words is a pretty dumb engineering as author pointed out. If you just want to make it easier to remember numbers, just convert them to a pronounceable base. Like bacadamafuge