>You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else kn

>You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have everybody else know exactly where they mean. 89c25855b9b That's the S2 string for a section of Times Square, NY. Usefully "89c25855b" is a well-defined, less precise location comprising a larger area. You can go up or down in levels of precision easily and everything can be stored as a single 64-bit integer with lots of extremely useful properties, (e.g. the use of the Hillbert Curve with all of it's benefits, like localization in address space and real space - see http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/ http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-...) If your system adds more benefits than this, I'd love to hear more about it!