
Nigeria has become the seventh country to adopt what3words for mail deliveries - CarolineW
https://what3words.com/partner/nipost/
======
NelsonMinar
Another reminder that a proprietary system from a for-profit company should
not be used as the basis for addressing in any country.

Here's some good reporting on the company:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/the-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/the-
most-interesting-story-about-postal-addresses-you-have-ever-read/487160/)

------
everdev
How is this convenient?

"doors.aware.secure" gives you no indication of where it could be, especially
when the neighbor is "hotel.leans.poetic"

If it's not meant for humans, then why not use GPS coordinates which are even
more precise?

Not to mention, I'm sure there will be insensitive randomly generated strings
like "muddy.ashes.pardon"
[https://map.what3words.com/muddy.ashes.pardon](https://map.what3words.com/muddy.ashes.pardon)

~~~
buttcoinslol
what3words is a large hash table mapping 3x3m squares of land with the key
being a unique three word phrase and the value being the 3x3 grid square.
That's really all it is. Oh, by the way, if the service goes down, everything
grinds to a halt because there is no backup analog system (maps, etc).

It's a solution searching for a problem, and existing mail and building
addressing schemes are far superior to it.

~~~
lxmorj
It's easy for humans to memorize, though I don't know exactly what that's
worth...

~~~
buttcoinslol
When all you need now is '123 Fake St, 12345' to get a map of a location and
directions to it on your phone, not much. You can locate '123 Fake St, 12345'
without a phone, so it wins.

~~~
xtreme
As others have pointed out, lots of places in underdeveloped countries don't
have street names and numbers.

~~~
buttcoinslol
As others have pointed out, and I quote, "a proprietary system from a for-
profit company should not be used as the basis for addressing in any country."

------
s0rce
Is it correct to assume the implementation isn't open and only what3words can
resolve 3words to location and vice versa? What happens if they close down,
would my mailing address no longer be resolvable? What happens then?

If you'd like to visit my office its at atomic.pipes.rods.

~~~
corprew
It looks like they've got that covered: "If we, what3words ltd, are ever
unable to maintain the what3words technology or make arrangements for it to be
maintained by a third-party (with that third-party being willing to make this
same commitment), then we will release our source code into the public domain.
We will do this in such a way and with suitable licences and documentation to
ensure that any and all users of what3words, whether they are individuals,
businesses, charitable organisations, aid agencies, governments or anyone else
can continue to rely on the what3words system." \--
[https://what3words.com/pricing/](https://what3words.com/pricing/)

~~~
s0rce
Not particularly reassuring, can't someone just create an open system with a
similar concept and release the mapping.

~~~
hobofan
When someone told about what3words, they also told me that they made money by
selling shorter or more pleasant word pairings to whoever was willing to pay,
but the only reference to that I could find is [0]. Having that requirement
would make it much more difficult to build such a system.

Apart from that, it's basically "just" geohashes with a different (population-
density based) encoding.

[0]:
[https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/08/what3words/](https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/08/what3words/)

~~~
mtmail
Those were called One Words. That was their old businesses model and
abandoned/pivoted.

------
tyingq
Only maps 2d space, so I'm not sure how they deal with apartment buildings and
high rise offices.

Because anyone can pick whatever 3m square portion of the building they want
to, it seems it would make mail sorting harder...a bundle for one specific
building.

~~~
gervase
From the article, it seems that it is best-applied in situations where the
following constraints apply:

1\. No existing national addressing system exists.

2\. Streets are not named (or do not exist).

3\. The address space to be described is extremely sparse.

4\. Mailing addresses are transient (i.e. buildings move, as tents, vehicles,
etc).

A dense apartment building in an urban area is unlikely to be described by any
of these constraints.

As mentioned elsewhere, these problems can also be solved by
latitude/longitude coordinates. However, this simply provides a friendlier
"hostname" convention to a numeric backend.

~~~
tyingq
The article does feature a picture from somewhere in Nigeria, featuring a
cluster of high rise buildings, and one of their 3 word addresses pointing
toward them.

------
josephpmay
I’ve never thought about this, but what3words could be hugely helpful for me.
My house is essentially located between two streets, and the street name in
the address isn’t the actual street where my mailbox is or where you’d enter
the gate, so loosing packages is common and it’s hard to explain to friends
how to find me

~~~
Seylerius
It seems like what3words is precisely as helpful as standard coordinates, with
the exception that coordinates don't depend on a proprietary company.

~~~
gervase
It seems to be me to be roughly analogous to the hostname <-> IP mapping; they
both describe the same place, but one is more memorable and easier to
communicate.

This company seems a far cry from ICANN, however.

------
t0mbstone
It's basically just a DNS system (providing friendly names) for GPS
coordinates (which, like IP addresses, are numbers and are hard to remember
off the top of your head).

I think it's kind of dumb that it requires a company to run, though. There are
around 170,000 words in the oxford english dictionary. If you take any
combination of three random words, you would have a grand total of 170,000 x
170,000 x 170,000 possible permutations, or 4,913,000,000,000,000 possible
permutations.

If you only took the top 50,000 most commonly used words, then you would have
50,000 x 50,000 x 50,000 = 125,000,000,000,000 possible permutations. That's
125 trillion combinations.

Guess how much disk space a word list of 479,000 words takes up? Oh, only 4.5
megabytes. (see: [https://github.com/dwyl/english-
words](https://github.com/dwyl/english-words))

It would be extremely easy to build an index of words, number them, then
correlate them to GPS coordinates, all with a simple client-side algorithm.

There is literally no reason at all why this needs to be a single company in
control of this. It could be a completely open source project, maintained by
the community. And it wouldn't need servers, because all you would need is a
small client-side app that would convert the numbers of your current GPS
coordinates to/from the word list combos (which would only be a couple
megabytes in size). This could be easily distributed as an android or ios app
that would run completely offline.

------
lioeters
I was comparing various encoding methods for a project not long ago, and one
of the most informative was this article:

Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems ([https://github.com/google/open-
location-code/wiki/Evaluation...](https://github.com/google/open-location-
code/wiki/Evaluation-of-Location-Encoding-Systems))

~~~
freyfogle
That article has it's own biases and factual inconsistencies (not sure if
intentional or just due to neglect). For example the article claims what3words
doesn't work offline. It does.

------
avar
Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap founder and what3words employee on why what3words
is a good thing: [https://stevecoast.com/2016/03/25/why-i-like-
what3words/](https://stevecoast.com/2016/03/25/why-i-like-what3words/)

~~~
LambdaComplex
A what3words employee saying what3words is a good thing? Especially one whose
position is literally called Chief Evangelist[0]? How shocking.

Conversely, (as another HN user pointed out), OpenStreetMap's opinion of
what3words is quite negative: "what3words is a commercial, non-open, patented
location reference schema. Open data advocates (such as the OpenStreetMap
community) would generally advise against adopting it at all."[1]

0\.
[https://www.directionsmag.com/pressrelease/5831](https://www.directionsmag.com/pressrelease/5831)

1\.
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/What3words)

------
demarq
I'm not affiliated to map code
[http://www.mapcode.com/](http://www.mapcode.com/) but they also have a
similar idea.

What I like about their approach is that you don't run the risk of your
business having a silly sounding address.

------
Gys
Its time someone starts an initiative to build a database of these locations
outside of what3words. Once a location (3 words) is added, translated into a
lat lon, it just a matter of looking it up.

~~~
tyingq
Only 57 trillion 3x3 meter squares to resolve...

~~~
Gys
Yes, its good to have a closer look at the numbers involved :-)

I found the habitual part of Earth to be 24,642,757 square miles [0]. A square
mile = 2589988.11 square meter [Google].

So that comes close to 7.1 trillion locations. It results in 7000 Gb for each
byte stored.

This makes me wonder if there is some kind of algorithm is involved. The
location names _seem_ randomly but might not be. Maybe its only random for the
superficial observer. Which could mean with a sufficient big enough sample the
algorithm can be found. Maybe even a relative small dataset with locations
close to each other could work already.

[0] =
[http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/land.html](http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/land.html)

~~~
tyingq
Yes, it's probably just some hashing function mapped to words.

But they do map the entire earth, including oceans.

------
hobofan
7 countries, all plagued with rampant corruption, adopted a foreign,
proprietary addressing scheme as part of their central infrastructure.

------
ColinWright
Hmm. author.alien.error.

Or appeal.appear.ledge.

------
corprew
I'm really glad that these folks are succeeding, they've been at it a really
long time. They contacted us when I was on a non-profit board that ran an
event a few years ago, and it was obvious that it was a great idea that we had
no way of implementing. Now that everyone has a phone with them all the time,
they're past that barrier.

I hope that they get great success.

~~~
pwinnski
This is a terrible idea, and it makes me sad that it is having any success at
all, limited though it may be.

~~~
jlgaddis
Yep, agreed. I _might_ think a little better of it if it were entirely open
(or anything other than some weird idea someone had for a way to make a few
dollars) but I still have trouble trying to come up with reasons why this
might be a good idea.

