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A bunch of replies to this are "I implemented my own version of What3Words". That sport has been around for a few years now. https://what3emojis.com/ https://wh

A bunch of replies to this are "I implemented my own version of What3Words". That sport has been around for a few years now. https://what3emojis.com/ https://what3emojis.com/ is probably the most long-lived; I'm writing from telephone bus eggplant. (Hacker News' lack of emoji support makes interop here a little difficult.) Unfortunately http://www.what3fucks.com/ http://www.what3fucks.com/ seems to have ended their incredible journey. It's a really stupid idea for addressing, triply so when you consider the pathetic little proprietary word database that's What3Words tool for extracting rents. Geohash is the oldest system that solves the problem of "give me a short textual name for a place" and has a nice ability to get more precise.

rburhum 6y ago
Hi Nelson, maybe you can explain this to me: why so much hate towards what3words? Chris once came to our office to see if there was a fit for us to use their invention. We did not find that it solved a pain point for us, so nothing came out of it... but the amount of rage that I see that they have been accumulating towards the years. Is there a story behind it beyond "I want to do something similar and can implement it, but <patent>?" Thanks in advance
- wwalexander 6y ago
  A standard for global addressing should not rely on a proprietary algorithm or wordlist, as it means that there is no legal method for using the standard besides using (paying for) What3Words’ API. This fits the common definition of rent-seeking behavior. This couples with the technological issues outlined in the article above. I believe the vitriol against W3W is fueled by the combination of rent-seeking behavior on a standard of poor technical quality. I’m also bothered that one of the main use cases W3W’s marketing highlights is for specifying locations in emergencies, a totally non-commercial/public-good application. W3W presents itself convincingly to laymen as this sort of public-good open standard, but they’re just another startup with a proprietary product they’re hoping to monopolize.
- jedberg 6y ago
  The hate is because they patented it. It is a useful idea, but it would be far more useful if the algorithm and wordlist were public domain and didn't require a license to use it.
- myself248 6y ago
  Furthermore, there's a payola scheme behind the scenes, to make sure automakers implement it in their infotainment systems and stuff, which they hope will force others to license it. It's a great idea, a mediocre implementation, and a set of business practices that make the antichrist jealous. On top of that, their bloodthirsty pursuit of any criticism means that legitimate discussions of the system's flaws can't happen in the open. The lack of that criticism may have encouraged some services to adopt W3W without realizing its flaws, and there's already some hinting that such a flaw may have already interfered with actual rescue operations: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56901363 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56901363 Thankfully the rescue was able to proceed once they switched to another coordinate system, and that case didn't result in a fatality. How many other such cases are there? We might never know. The company may have literal blood on its hands at this point, but fixing the flaws would require discussing them first, which we can't do as long as they're empowered to shut down discourse.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  W3W has sent a legal threat to a security researcher[1][2] for tweeting about and sharing the open-source software alternative WhatFreeWords. Great way to make friends! and here[3] is a long article of why w3w isn't safe for the use-cases they're peddling. tl;dr: they're a garbage company, with a garbage product, run by ghouls. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/what3words-legal-threat-whatfreewords/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/what3words-legal-threat-wh... [2] https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1387933438305394690 https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1387933438305394690 [3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what3words-confusion-suitable-emergency-response-gary-delaney/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what3words-confusion-suitable...
- NelsonMinar 6y ago
  Hi Ragi! My complaint with What3Words is 85% their proprietary business model. They are literally trying to convince less developed countries to adopt their system in lieu of developing their own addressing systems. So that What3Words can forever force that country and anyone sending mail to it to pay them fees. It is evil. This is not theoretical; back in 2017 they were bragging at how they'd convinced the nations of Kiribati, Mongolia, Sint-Maarten, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Tonga, Nigeria and the Solomon Islands to use them as a national standard. I'm certain that the actual usage is exaggerated on their part but imagine if it were really true. Addressing is far too important to be held by a proprietary company. Addressing is a national service that countries should provide as part of being a nation, and there's a long history of countries developing addressing systems that does not rely on some predatory intellectual property system. 5% of my annoyance is What3Words pretends like they invented some brilliant new idea that's unique and should be IP protected. No, the idea is older than them. And the implementation is obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in the art of addressing. Anyone competent with GIS concepts can design a similar system in a few days' work. And there are many better alternatives. The other 10% of my complaint is their static addressing model. It's not good that two houses nearby have completely different addresses; real addressing always has hierarchical names and there's a reason for that. There's also a problem using words in that they are localized to the country's language. That's better than forcing English everywhere but makes interoperability way more confusing. Finally there's all the problems people keep finding with their word lists; that's covered well by other writers so I won't go into it. PS: I misspoke when I said Geohash is the oldest similar system. MGRS dates to the 1940s. There may be older ones, too.
daleharvey 6y ago
A location near me geohash: gcuvz30z w3w: drift.march.donor I had to switch tabs 3 times to copy across the geohash since the page I found it on wouldnt let me copy and paste, I remembered the w3w immediately. I am 100% against something like a global addressing standard being owned by a single company, however the amount of people ignoring w3w's extremely obvious utility and pointing to pluscodes, geohashing, grid references, geocoords etc is pretty tiring. We have a standards body for emojis, cant we just agree on an open w3w implementation.
- cybergibbons 6y ago
  Why 3 words? Why not 4?
  - aembleton 6y ago
    Because it is enough to provide sufficient accuracy.
    - detaro 6y ago
      Why not 4 words and a smaller, less error-prone word list?
    - cybergibbons 6y ago
      Only with a ridiculously long word list containing plurals and words people can't spell.
- jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
  Nelson is right. A bunch of us have played around with designing our own human friendly geohash scheme. If you divide earth up into 4m x 4m cells using something like the S2 projection, you can uniquely address these using phrases of 3 words drawn from a database just under 32,000 words. The S2 projection ensures that the words in the higher levels of the hierarchy will change quite slowly. In most local contexts there will be only a single commonly repeated word. In a small number of more exceptional points there'd be just 2 or 3 unique values in use. So in practice you could use longer addresses and a smaller dictionary if you liked. This is probably a good idea for ergonomic reasons, as we can pick a set of words that are readily translated between languages, weed out any that are overly similar, etc. I never uploaded the code anywhere, and it's on a laptop that died, but I busted out a toy version of the above in an afternoon a couple years ago just for fun. I used 4 word addresses and a database of about 2,500 of the most common english words. W3W's entire value proposition is that they should earn a global rent off the use of addresses vs the above. It's absurd. And they intentionally avoid hierarchical organization of the addresses specifically to make it necessary to use their app/service to look crap up, which makes their service hilariously worse than the scheme described above. With an S2 style hierarchy people will intuitively begin to recognize the common words in their living area at each level, and can use them in conversation without even consulting software. This is completely impossible with W3W's scheme. The problem isn't figuring out a good scheme. Most of the people on this forum can manage that in a couple hours. The problem is the same with all other standardization efforts: getting a critical mass of people who give enough of a crap to use the standard. This is an area where Google could ship something in maps and it'd have a decent chance of adoption outside of it. If you work on maps consider pitching a more ergonomic version of plus codes.
Twisell 6y ago
The fundamental flaw for me goes deeper. Both services mimic the principle of URL shortener applied to geographic location. (Even if, as you point out, one is public domain machine readable and the other is proprietary human readable one). But why are url shortener so popular in the first place? Why are they perfectly usable even if competing services exits? (and I'd bet most popular are self-generated like youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ). I think they are popular mainly because they rely on the ubiquitous HTTP protocol to be fully interoperable with almost any HTTP client. There is no such universal protocol or library to manage geospatial data provided in "custom hashed format". But all of the various tools available will gladly accept a latitude/longitude XY coordinate pair because they are perfectly machine readable and while not human friendly they actually mean something so that professionals can make sense of the numbers if needed. Also as far as variable precision is needed, let's throw a round(,) function and be set with it. So as of now both solution are essentially some kind of private API with no widely available and stadardised support to revert to a usable latitude/longitude. So I would guess many GIS power users look at this suspiciously secretly hoping that no one will ever share such obfuscated data format to them for any critical use. NB : For more complex data representations there is a whole standard defining organisation https://www.ogc.org https://www.ogc.org that define horribly complex (yet useful) data structures and gladly make the standard freely and publicly available. Maybe they could enforce a flavor of geohash into a FOSS standard so that tooling could refer to it, but I'm not sure it's on their roadmap.
jhgb 6y ago
> https://what3emojis.com/ https://what3emojis.com/ is probably the most long-lived What's the spatial resolution of that? Seems to be dozens of meters at best.
- SahAssar 6y ago
  The about page says 4m, but I could drag their example map over multiple blocks in my city without the emojis changing.
  - jhgb 6y ago
    That's exactly the thing I noticed, too.
    - dingaling 6y ago
      My phone doesn't have the emoji character for the second element around Dartford, London, UK so I just see an invalid grey box. Not a resilient solution.
- tofof 6y ago
  By my measurement, no finer than 4290 feet / 1.31 km. https://i.imgur.com/HKN3hyN.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HKN3hyN.jpg Both of these endpoints (and everything in between) are [telephone][megaphone][currency-exchange]. https://i.imgur.com/TzUU1cG.png https://i.imgur.com/TzUU1cG.png https://i.imgur.com/5iTtm6c.png https://i.imgur.com/5iTtm6c.png
- NelsonMinar 6y ago
  I regret to inform you this parody of What3Words is not a completely usable and accurate system.
jokoon 6y ago
Yes, geohash makes more sense, letter numbers are better, since people would still have to memorize words, which is a little similar with letters. They would still write it down or copy paste it. Another solution would be a smaller set of easier words, on subgrids like geohash, because gradual precision is really better.
lbbb 6y ago
Other similar implementations were either DMCA'd off of various platforms or had their domains seized by lawyers, their legal actions go back a few years already I suppose the emoji version survives because it doesn't infringe on their word list or patent, which specifically is for "words"
howdoidothehack 5y ago
There is an alternative to what3fucks https://www.fourkingmaps.co.uk/ https://www.fourkingmaps.co.uk/ idk how long it'll be up for though

rburhum 6y ago

Hi Nelson, maybe you can explain this to me: why so much hate towards what3words? Chris once came to our office to see if there was a fit for us to use their invention. We did not find that it solved a pain point for us, so nothing came out of it... but the amount of rage that I see that they have been accumulating towards the years. Is there a story behind it beyond "I want to do something similar and can implement it, but <patent>?" Thanks in advance

wwalexander 6y ago
A standard for global addressing should not rely on a proprietary algorithm or wordlist, as it means that there is no legal method for using the standard besides using (paying for) What3Words’ API. This fits the common definition of rent-seeking behavior. This couples with the technological issues outlined in the article above. I believe the vitriol against W3W is fueled by the combination of rent-seeking behavior on a standard of poor technical quality. I’m also bothered that one of the main use cases W3W’s marketing highlights is for specifying locations in emergencies, a totally non-commercial/public-good application. W3W presents itself convincingly to laymen as this sort of public-good open standard, but they’re just another startup with a proprietary product they’re hoping to monopolize.
jedberg 6y ago
The hate is because they patented it. It is a useful idea, but it would be far more useful if the algorithm and wordlist were public domain and didn't require a license to use it.
myself248 6y ago
Furthermore, there's a payola scheme behind the scenes, to make sure automakers implement it in their infotainment systems and stuff, which they hope will force others to license it. It's a great idea, a mediocre implementation, and a set of business practices that make the antichrist jealous. On top of that, their bloodthirsty pursuit of any criticism means that legitimate discussions of the system's flaws can't happen in the open. The lack of that criticism may have encouraged some services to adopt W3W without realizing its flaws, and there's already some hinting that such a flaw may have already interfered with actual rescue operations: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56901363 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56901363 Thankfully the rescue was able to proceed once they switched to another coordinate system, and that case didn't result in a fatality. How many other such cases are there? We might never know. The company may have literal blood on its hands at this point, but fixing the flaws would require discussing them first, which we can't do as long as they're empowered to shut down discourse.
DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
W3W has sent a legal threat to a security researcher[1][2] for tweeting about and sharing the open-source software alternative WhatFreeWords. Great way to make friends! and here[3] is a long article of why w3w isn't safe for the use-cases they're peddling. tl;dr: they're a garbage company, with a garbage product, run by ghouls. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/what3words-legal-threat-whatfreewords/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/what3words-legal-threat-wh... [2] https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1387933438305394690 https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1387933438305394690 [3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what3words-confusion-suitable-emergency-response-gary-delaney/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what3words-confusion-suitable...
NelsonMinar 6y ago
Hi Ragi! My complaint with What3Words is 85% their proprietary business model. They are literally trying to convince less developed countries to adopt their system in lieu of developing their own addressing systems. So that What3Words can forever force that country and anyone sending mail to it to pay them fees. It is evil. This is not theoretical; back in 2017 they were bragging at how they'd convinced the nations of Kiribati, Mongolia, Sint-Maarten, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Tonga, Nigeria and the Solomon Islands to use them as a national standard. I'm certain that the actual usage is exaggerated on their part but imagine if it were really true. Addressing is far too important to be held by a proprietary company. Addressing is a national service that countries should provide as part of being a nation, and there's a long history of countries developing addressing systems that does not rely on some predatory intellectual property system. 5% of my annoyance is What3Words pretends like they invented some brilliant new idea that's unique and should be IP protected. No, the idea is older than them. And the implementation is obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in the art of addressing. Anyone competent with GIS concepts can design a similar system in a few days' work. And there are many better alternatives. The other 10% of my complaint is their static addressing model. It's not good that two houses nearby have completely different addresses; real addressing always has hierarchical names and there's a reason for that. There's also a problem using words in that they are localized to the country's language. That's better than forcing English everywhere but makes interoperability way more confusing. Finally there's all the problems people keep finding with their word lists; that's covered well by other writers so I won't go into it. PS: I misspoke when I said Geohash is the oldest similar system. MGRS dates to the 1940s. There may be older ones, too.

daleharvey 6y ago

A location near me geohash: gcuvz30z w3w: drift.march.donor I had to switch tabs 3 times to copy across the geohash since the page I found it on wouldnt let me copy and paste, I remembered the w3w immediately. I am 100% against something like a global addressing standard being owned by a single company, however the amount of people ignoring w3w's extremely obvious utility and pointing to pluscodes, geohashing, grid references, geocoords etc is pretty tiring. We have a standards body for emojis, cant we just agree on an open w3w implementation.

cybergibbons 6y ago
Why 3 words? Why not 4?
- aembleton 6y ago
  Because it is enough to provide sufficient accuracy.
  - detaro 6y ago
    Why not 4 words and a smaller, less error-prone word list?
  - cybergibbons 6y ago
    Only with a ridiculously long word list containing plurals and words people can't spell.
jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
Nelson is right. A bunch of us have played around with designing our own human friendly geohash scheme. If you divide earth up into 4m x 4m cells using something like the S2 projection, you can uniquely address these using phrases of 3 words drawn from a database just under 32,000 words. The S2 projection ensures that the words in the higher levels of the hierarchy will change quite slowly. In most local contexts there will be only a single commonly repeated word. In a small number of more exceptional points there'd be just 2 or 3 unique values in use. So in practice you could use longer addresses and a smaller dictionary if you liked. This is probably a good idea for ergonomic reasons, as we can pick a set of words that are readily translated between languages, weed out any that are overly similar, etc. I never uploaded the code anywhere, and it's on a laptop that died, but I busted out a toy version of the above in an afternoon a couple years ago just for fun. I used 4 word addresses and a database of about 2,500 of the most common english words. W3W's entire value proposition is that they should earn a global rent off the use of addresses vs the above. It's absurd. And they intentionally avoid hierarchical organization of the addresses specifically to make it necessary to use their app/service to look crap up, which makes their service hilariously worse than the scheme described above. With an S2 style hierarchy people will intuitively begin to recognize the common words in their living area at each level, and can use them in conversation without even consulting software. This is completely impossible with W3W's scheme. The problem isn't figuring out a good scheme. Most of the people on this forum can manage that in a couple hours. The problem is the same with all other standardization efforts: getting a critical mass of people who give enough of a crap to use the standard. This is an area where Google could ship something in maps and it'd have a decent chance of adoption outside of it. If you work on maps consider pitching a more ergonomic version of plus codes.

Twisell 6y ago

The fundamental flaw for me goes deeper. Both services mimic the principle of URL shortener applied to geographic location. (Even if, as you point out, one is public domain machine readable and the other is proprietary human readable one). But why are url shortener so popular in the first place? Why are they perfectly usable even if competing services exits? (and I'd bet most popular are self-generated like youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ). I think they are popular mainly because they rely on the ubiquitous HTTP protocol to be fully interoperable with almost any HTTP client. There is no such universal protocol or library to manage geospatial data provided in "custom hashed format". But all of the various tools available will gladly accept a latitude/longitude XY coordinate pair because they are perfectly machine readable and while not human friendly they actually mean something so that professionals can make sense of the numbers if needed. Also as far as variable precision is needed, let's throw a round(,) function and be set with it. So as of now both solution are essentially some kind of private API with no widely available and stadardised support to revert to a usable latitude/longitude. So I would guess many GIS power users look at this suspiciously secretly hoping that no one will ever share such obfuscated data format to them for any critical use. NB : For more complex data representations there is a whole standard defining organisation https://www.ogc.org https://www.ogc.org that define horribly complex (yet useful) data structures and gladly make the standard freely and publicly available. Maybe they could enforce a flavor of geohash into a FOSS standard so that tooling could refer to it, but I'm not sure it's on their roadmap.

jhgb 6y ago

> https://what3emojis.com/ https://what3emojis.com/ is probably the most long-lived What's the spatial resolution of that? Seems to be dozens of meters at best.

SahAssar 6y ago
The about page says 4m, but I could drag their example map over multiple blocks in my city without the emojis changing.
- jhgb 6y ago
  That's exactly the thing I noticed, too.
  - dingaling 6y ago
    My phone doesn't have the emoji character for the second element around Dartford, London, UK so I just see an invalid grey box. Not a resilient solution.
tofof 6y ago
By my measurement, no finer than 4290 feet / 1.31 km. https://i.imgur.com/HKN3hyN.jpg https://i.imgur.com/HKN3hyN.jpg Both of these endpoints (and everything in between) are [telephone][megaphone][currency-exchange]. https://i.imgur.com/TzUU1cG.png https://i.imgur.com/TzUU1cG.png https://i.imgur.com/5iTtm6c.png https://i.imgur.com/5iTtm6c.png
NelsonMinar 6y ago
I regret to inform you this parody of What3Words is not a completely usable and accurate system.

jokoon 6y ago

Yes, geohash makes more sense, letter numbers are better, since people would still have to memorize words, which is a little similar with letters. They would still write it down or copy paste it. Another solution would be a smaller set of easier words, on subgrids like geohash, because gradual precision is really better.

lbbb 6y ago

Other similar implementations were either DMCA'd off of various platforms or had their domains seized by lawyers, their legal actions go back a few years already I suppose the emoji version survives because it doesn't infringe on their word list or patent, which specifically is for "words"

howdoidothehack 5y ago

There is an alternative to what3fucks https://www.fourkingmaps.co.uk/ https://www.fourkingmaps.co.uk/ idk how long it'll be up for though