4 ms·
I think the reason that what3words has taken off while (almost objectively) better systems are mostly unused is that it’s just more fun, which makes it innately
by bspammer 4y ago
I think the reason that what3words has taken off while (almost objectively) better systems are mostly unused is that it’s just more fun, which makes it innately viral. Looking up your house and finding it’s called crazy.wooden.marmot is something you’re likely to share and remember. Plus codes don’t have the same appeal.
Also, the vast majority of people really don’t care that it’s proprietary, sadly.
- EGreg 4y agoGEOHASH is way better!
- croes 4y agoFor people?
- samwillis 4y agoAgreed, but also having a boat load of VC cash to invest in a massive marketing campaign helped. It's just a shame W3W couldn't have been an industry consortium, or open standard. Due to EU/UK database laws it's illegal to have an open source implementation with the same words. W3W are the sole gatekeeper of the system, it's almost worse than UK postcodes being owned by (the publicly traded company) Royal Mail. Interesting connection... one of the what3words founders is a question editor on the UK game show Only Connect.
- kimburgess 4y agoI think the key is it does a great job at the human-to-human aspect, which I lot of location encodings fail at. It's a good demonstration of 7 ± 2 [1] in practice. In many cases when communicating this style of location, at least one person in that exchange is likely under some form of stress (lost, navigating an unfamiliar area, in need of help, etc). These locations encodings are a compression mechanism and the absolute goal should be to minimise the encode/decode complexity for the people tasked with that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus...