
What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m - christudor
http://what3words.com/about
======
codingdave
Clever, but not very practical. Addressing and city/state/country names are
very well ingrained into our culture and have real-world meaning. We can
understand the general location of an address just by reading it. w3w takes
all context out of location names, and forces you to map it with a tool. I
don't see how that will improve anything.

As you can purchase a one word name for a specific location, this really just
looks to me like someone trying to quickly make a buck with a clever idea,
similar to the "milion dollar homepage".

If they did have a more meaningful intent, it is not communicated well enough
for me to have received the message.

~~~
freyfogle
You're commenting from the perspective of someone who comes from a culture
with addresses. Most of the world doesn't have addresses.

Try to go to a meeting in India. It typically involves three or four phone
calls to find the place.

~~~
adventured
You really think most people live at locations without addressing systems? How
can we even prove that?

The only locations I'm aware of that that is true are: very poor parts of
Asia, Africa, India, and maybe some of the favelas of Brazil.

With essentially all of North America, South America, Europe, and much of
China, along with all of Japan, Australia, being covered by an addressing
system.

I'd wager 2/3 of all people live in a location with normal addresses.

~~~
gilesrhysjones
It's the other way round - "two thirds of the world’s population is without a
postal address,” Charles Prescott, Executive Director at the Global Address
Data Association

50 or 60 countries have postal code or address databases which are kept
reasonably current...’ ... ‘In the least developed countries, [address
verification] may only mean that the city or town exists in that country.’-
UNIVERSAL POSTAL UNION

“Over 50 percent of the world’s urban dwellers do not have access to named
streets.” Catherine Farvacque-Vitkovic, World Bank

That's around 4 Billion people without an address.

------
NelsonMinar
This is only tangentially related in that it's not using ordinary words. But
GeoHash always struck me as a clever encoding for lat/lon pairs. Locations
look like "u4pruydqqvj", so gibberish, but concise. The neat thing is geohash
is a progressive encoding so you can lop off characters from the right and
still be naming the same area, just less precisely. Ie while u4pruydqqvj is a
specific point in Denmark u4pru is just sort of in the area of Denmark. More
details:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash)

~~~
gren
Geohash looks brillant!

------
ChrisNorstrom
They got me all excited and yet left me hanging when it comes to finding out
MY w3w address. Where's the link to look up my address and discover my 3
words?

What it's bad at:

\- Sharing it with people. Where is snake.delta.chair? Dunno. It gives an
offline human no info as to weather that address is even in their country.
Normal addresses tell you the state, city, street name and other valuable
info. W3w doesn't.

\- It's not accurate. What about PO Boxes? Suites and apartment numbers?
Duplexes? Office buildings? Skyscrapers? What if the w3w square has 2 or more
houses on it? It's good for only rough estimate geo-coordinates.

\- It simplifies the memorability of addresses, but destroys an addresses
ability to be descriptive.

What's it perfect for:

Sharing your w3w address with computers. Geo mapping using human words rather
than data coordinates. You can quickly leave your home / business geo-address
on your photos (if you want your photos tied to your address and not the
current GPS coordinates of your camera) or blog without having to remember a
long string of number coordinates.

------
Doctor_Fegg
There's a lot to like about w3w, but note that the word->location mapping
isn't open data, so think carefully before becoming too reliant on it.

~~~
Frozenlock
Thanks for this comment.

Seems to me a localization scheme should be open if it ever hopes to get
traction.

------
mostly_harmless
The biggest problem I see with these global addressing schemes is that they
have nothing to do with the location, and they dont have any locality.
Snake.Dog.Rabbit is in a location with no snakes, dogs or rabbits and is right
next to Lamp.Chair.Guitar? Theres no visible logic to it. its just easier to
say 123 River Road. By the name you know its likely to be near a river, and it
will be right next to 124 River Road

~~~
icebraining
But how many street names are actually related to the local geography? At
least where I live - an old European country -, they're either based on the
name of a more-or-less obscure dead personality (e.g. my street is named after
a marquis from the 16th century) or after something that happened there
decades or centuries ago (e.g. Merchants' street).

~~~
jay-anderson
In Phoenix, Arizona the major streets vaguely relate to the location. The
layout is a big grid (for the most part). The north-south streets are numbers
and east-west streets are named (you need to memorize the order). There is a
central avenue with street numbers increasing both east and west. "Avenues"
are on the west side and "Streets" are on the east. Given the major cross
streets it's pretty easy to find your way there.

I believe many Utah cities are more extreme than this with a grid and all
street names being a number + a direction.

You're right though. These are the exception and not the rule.

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ionforce
Why even allow similar sounding words? Lamp and lamps?

I thought the whole point was to avoid ambiguity.

I wonder where there corpus of words comes from..?

~~~
quarterto
Yeah, and you're one letter away from "oops, accidentally shipped my package
to Australia"

~~~
cjrsheldrick
It's much better to be so far away you know it's wrong at the searching stage,
rather than 3 miles away as with similar postcodes, co-ordinates etc when you
don't know it's wrong which often results in delays/wasted journeys.

~~~
notahacker
It's much better still not to have the ambiguity. And a non-plural version of
my home three words is in the same city, just the wrong side...

------
Spone
Yay my address, when translated from French, is something like
"throat.shame.cutting". I'm eager to share it with friends!

------
NKCSS
Funny, they have a perfectly translated Dutch version they serve to me, it
looks like a lot of effort and time has been put into this project.

~~~
tinco
Yeah, also a bit useless. I don't think many Dutch people exist that can't
read English, or even that don't enjoy reading English. Those that don't most
likely don't browse the web much either.

~~~
icebraining
On the other hand, the same is not true of other countries, and it'd be weird
to leave Dutch out just because they have more proficiency. The marginal cost
is not that great.

------
swehner
Their condusion-avoidance example is table-chair-lamp vs. table-chair-lamps.

Let's look at more singular/plural combinations.

[http://what3words.com/tables.chair.lamp](http://what3words.com/tables.chair.lamp)
is close to Minneapolis

[http://what3words.com/table.chairs.lamp](http://what3words.com/table.chairs.lamp)
pretty close to
[http://what3words.com/tables.chairs.lamp](http://what3words.com/tables.chairs.lamp)
are on the east coast of the USA.

West coast:
[http://what3words.com/tables.chairs.lamps](http://what3words.com/tables.chairs.lamps)
is close to
[http://what3words.com/table.chair.lamps](http://what3words.com/table.chair.lamps),
both are on the opposite side of the continent to
[http://what3words.com/table.chairs.lamps](http://what3words.com/table.chairs.lamps)
which is pretty close to
[http://what3words.com/tables.chair.lamps](http://what3words.com/tables.chair.lamps)

Very confusing!

~~~
gilesrhysjones
minneapolis tables.chair.lamp - between 1000 miles (east coast) & 2000 miles
(west coast) of the below

west coast table.chairs.lamps - 194 miles - tables.chair.lamps

east coast tables.chairs.lamps - 340 miles - table.chair.lamps

Disclaimer - I work for what3words

------
Vanzetti
This is stupid on so many levels. What about floors? 3m x 3m in a skyscraper
can be an address of thousands of people. And why even allow the oceans?

~~~
cjrsheldrick
Why not allow the oceans? The most common, shortest words are on land, the
longest, least common words are reserved for the oceans, so the "land" 3 word
combinations aren't affected at all by the inclusion of the oceans. For now,
most navigation for everyone is based around a 2D map so, 2D is sufficient. If
the world becomes fluent in 3D navigation, then there could easily be an
optional extra parameter for height.

------
pherocity_
Great, my house is borderline inappropriate. Before seeing that, I thought
this was a neat idea.

------
cabirum
Similar precision can be achieved by using GPS coordinates with four (10 m
accuracy) to five (1 m) decimal digits, sometimes even fewer depending on
location as you don't need trailing zeroes.

The coordinate system is old, ubiquitous, and it's readability is similar to
that of ipv4 addresses.

So it's [13.054:5.237] vs "surcharge.caveman.echo".

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_degrees](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_degrees)

[2] [http://gis.stackexchange.com/a/8674](http://gis.stackexchange.com/a/8674)

~~~
gilesrhysjones
Unfortunately your ability to remember long strings of random numbers &
letters is 30% at 8 & hits zero at around 10. Accurately remembering 4 words
(they didn't test 3) is around 80%. Chart here:
[http://what3words.tumblr.com/post/102799066306/remembering-a...](http://what3words.tumblr.com/post/102799066306/remembering-
alphanumeric-vs-lat-long-vs-3-words)

------
lifeisstillgood
Tl;dr DNS (human readble names) for physical locations on earths surface.

It's a nice idea "I will meet you at chair.lion.knowledge" is better than meet
you at grid location 123.456.5676

But to be honest I know roughly where in London SW1 2EE is and the amount of
times I will need that level of accuracy for an address in Mumbai or LA is
quite limited. In addition "chair.lion.zebra" is actually less readable to
billions of non Latin script natives around the world than numerical
addresses.

Ah well - it's a nice idea.

~~~
freyfogle
It works in many different languages, including many non-latin script
languages.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I may have missed that part - but how? If say for example 甲骨文 represents my
campsite, how on earth do I tell anyone as a non Chinese speaker. And if my
campsite near Beijing is represented by English words how is that useful to
the Chinese delivery driver? And if the two overlap what on earth is the point
- we jus have lots of local or non local means of representing the Location -
a Chinese local representation may as well be whatever they have now and I can
keep to grid references for everything outside of London and the Home
Counties. (It's uncivilised outside the borders I hear).

~~~
freyfogle
I would hypothesize that the vast majority of communication is between two
speakers of the same language.

------
aw3c2
Some disclaimers since they at least used their normal nicknames. There are
fresh accounts commenting super positively. They are:

gilesrhysjones, the Marketing Director at what3words

cjrsheldrick, the Co-founder of what3words

There are also
[http://locationawarenames.org/](http://locationawarenames.org/) and
[http://www.mapcode.com/](http://www.mapcode.com/) . I find them all really
questionable as they try to push non-free, centralised setups.

~~~
gilesrhysjones
No impropriety intended. Yes I work for what3words. Apologies for not
disclaiming comments & replies.

------
gilesrhysjones
Some interesting commentary on what3words in last weeks Spectator:
[http://www.spectator.co.uk/life/the-wiki-man/9348462/the-
bes...](http://www.spectator.co.uk/life/the-wiki-man/9348462/the-best-
navigation-idea-ive-seen-since-the-tube-map/)

------
chiph
Do I also need a Google Maps license for my application? Looks like they're
using their tiles.

------
amolgupta
Assuming everythig and everyone is having a GPS device its good. But in real
world, anyone would understand that 1st cross 2nd main is near 2nd cross 2nd
main but its impossible to know if lion.chocolate.news is near to
bottle.key.bed or half way across the world.

~~~
bastijn
Aah, crossings of numbered streets. You must be living in the US? Numbered
streets are relatively rare in the world. I invite you to Google the street
names in Amsterdam, capital of the Netherlands. That logic won't work there.

However, despite your not so well chosen example I do agree that this solution
isn't my main view of the future. I think in a few years we will have Internet
everywhere, even outside the boundaries of our country. I kind of have it,
even when travelling (work or holidays). But I understand I'm still a
minority. Once this happens we just WhatsApp, message, send our location via
our mobile device. The other person clicks it and is navigated to your
location.

Who needs (three) words?

------
poooogles
Ha, I actually helped launch this site when it first went live with Cat2. From
what I remember the codebase was pretty decent considering how well it
performed on not much hardware.

------
bratao
I wonder what the motivation that a nearby location have a completely
different name. It is hard to know if two places are close just by the name.

~~~
cjrsheldrick
Context is being sacrificed for a very slick auto-correct system (in beta,
going live v soon). When similar sounding 3 word combinations are shuffled
around the world, it's pretty clear based on user location which result is the
intended one. As a result, you can misspell pretty badly and the system will
still handle it. Most exciting is that processing of voice input of 3 words is
virtually 100% accurate using the same auto-correct algorithm - also coming v
soon.

~~~
chippy
That's two "3 words" that are textually close to each other not two places
which are spatially close.

------
gilesrhysjones
"Two thirds of the world’s population is without a postal address,” Charles
Prescott, Executive Director at the Global Address Data Association

50 or 60 countries have postal code or address databases which are kept
reasonably current...’ ... ‘In the least developed countries, address
verification may only mean that the city or town exists in that country.’-
UNIVERSAL POSTAL UNION

“Over 50 percent of the world’s urban dwellers do not have access to named
streets.” Catherine Farvacque-Vitkovic, World Bank

That's around 4 Billion people without an address.

------
CJefferson
The problem with this is that words always mean something. I don't want my
house to be named fast.blazed.depravity

