
3-word code is address of 57M 3-square-meter patches on earth's surface - aj7
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/12/world/what-in-the-world/mongolia-post-what3words.html?module=WatchingPortal&region=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=wide&state=standard&contentPlacement=1&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2016%2F08%2F12%2Fworld%2Fwhat-in-the-world%2Fmongolia-post-what3words.html&eventName=Watching-article-click
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robin_reala
The big problem with what3words (leaving aside the disconjunction of
individual areas) is that the data is their IP and you’re not allowed to reuse
it for your own purposes
([http://developer.what3words.com/api/licence/](http://developer.what3words.com/api/licence/))

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uptown
Kinda defeats the entire purpose then doesn't it?

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aw3c2
Their purpose is making money, not improving peoples lives.

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uptown
Right, but how do they expect to get adoption at-scale if usage is tightly
constrained and pricing is opaque?

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deciplex
Currently that's the "???" before "Profit!" but I'm sure they'll figure
something out.

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uptown
Seems they missed the golden opportunity to treat keyword sets as the adwords
of location. Who wouldn't want to live at: banana.capitalone.waterslide?

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Faaak
Also: [http://www.what3fucks.com/](http://www.what3fucks.com/)
[http://www.what3ikea.com/](http://www.what3ikea.com/)
[http://www.what3pokemon.com/](http://www.what3pokemon.com/)

etc…

Nothing new, except a stupid "non-optimal" idea. All the useless info a brain
has to remember: the adress next to me ? I'm in "foo bar baz", so next to me
should be "foo bar buz" ? No, it's "blih blah bloh". Nobody will remember it.

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MrPatan
And by the same reason, nobody will give your parcel addressed to foo bar baz
to your neighbor at blih blah bloh, would they?

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SlashmanX
No, but they could give it to foo bar bay which is 3 thousand miles away.

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pweissbrod
[For Mr. Hutagt, providing people with an easy, free system to be found is
“one of the more common, basic human rights.”]

I'm curious how useful three random mid-level english words are to a common
mongolian nomad as a navigation system

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mtmail
It supports Mongolian and other languages with a separate dictionary
([http://what3words.com/](http://what3words.com/) top right you can select a
language)

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Pamar
Yeah, tried it (see my other comment in the thread). So, assuming I live at
kicks.pasta.steer and someone in Mongolia wants to write me should he use:

kicks.pasta.steer or хуучныг.зүүлт.суурилах or ones.necklace.based-on or
цохилтын чадваруудаар.гоймон.чиглэх ?

~~~
mtmail
I'd guess same with existing addresses (street name, city name, country name):
you write what the local postman can best read. In the API the language
parameter is optional so I'd say whatever system/app/website translates it to
coordinates both languages work.

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megamark16
So if my front door is steers.pasta.kicks and the end of of my driveway is
effort.army.blur, there's really no rhyme or reason to it.

It seems like it should act more like web domains, so my city would be "park",
my neighborhood would be "lung" and finally down to my street and house being
one of the small blocks inside that. Honestly, making it 4 words seems like
you could really break it down in a logical way.

~~~
hantusk
Agree. One could use the word2vec vector space to determine close relations
between neutral words, so it would make intuitive sense as well.

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afarrell
But that would make it _harder_ to remember. "Was it apricot.bubble.morose or
apricot.bubble.dejected ?"

~~~
megamark16
I think part of what I like about this idea is that the vectors inside a
larger vector would be the same across larger vectors, for example the very
bottom left corner vector is "apple" across all larger vectors. Eventually
perhaps we would all even start to recognize vector locations. What if each
vector name was even categorized, so you knew that fruits were in the bottom
left area of a block, and sports names (i.e. baseball, basketball, etc) are in
the top right area of a vector.

Silly, maybe, but I like the idea of people having a general idea of what area
something is in based solely off word usage.

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daenney
This was on the front page yesterday, seems rather similar:
[http://xaddress.org](http://xaddress.org).

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blaze33
Indeed, xaddress lists alternatives on its readme (including what3words):
[https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/blob/master/README.md#a...](https://github.com/roberdam/Xaddress/blob/master/README.md#alternatives)

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Jabbles
Hopefully with context, which of these you meant will be obvious.

[https://map.what3words.com/eyebrows.conforms.zebra](https://map.what3words.com/eyebrows.conforms.zebra)
[https://map.what3words.com/eyebrow.conforms.zebra](https://map.what3words.com/eyebrow.conforms.zebra)
[https://map.what3words.com/eyebrows.conform.zebra](https://map.what3words.com/eyebrows.conform.zebra)
[https://map.what3words.com/eyebrow.conform.zebra](https://map.what3words.com/eyebrow.conform.zebra)

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blaze33
Actually 9-square-meters (3 by 3 meters squares)

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MandieD
... and 57 trillion of them, not 57 million

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jbb555
Like I said on the other post yesterday, fun, but a "solution" looking for a
problem. We already have addresses. They work.

~~~
mtmail
You have an address, most readers of HN have one. The article is about people
in Mongolia not having addresses

"a stand-in for the more common addressing convention of house number, street
name and postal code, which never quite caught on in Mongolia, one of the
world’s most sparsely populated countries"

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darkblackcorner
Cool idea, but how do you deal with flats or multi-stories? What about mail
distribution - how do you group items for the same area?

~~~
daenney
What I've seen in quite a few flats is that at the entrance floor there's a
floor plan with names, so if you know to whom it is addressed and you have the
right building you can deliver it. I've even seen more curious scenario's on
islands in Greece for example where all you need to know is the person's name
and the town they live in, the mailman does the rest since they make it their
business to know who lives where :).

People can get very creative when it comes to these things. There's a very
common concept of "old lady surveillance" in the Mediterranean where the
elderly sort of function like a bottomless address book if you ever need to
get directions and can usually complement a police report too, since they just
tend to observe everything going on in their neighbourhood.

As far as mail distribution goes, I think since you can reverse the lookup to
find the actual geographical location you could do that in a mail distribution
centre and bundle things up for delivery, much like postcodes are used.

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quickben
Misspelling will be oh-so-costly.

~~~
qu1mby
As I understand it, it is designed to put common misspellings/close-spellings
of the three word phrase (eg. cat.mice.dog vs. cat.mice.dogs) in totally
different parts of the earth, so that it is immediately obvious on lookup that
you have the wrong address.

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aw3c2
Someone shared these on Facebook, 300km distance between Chicago and Gradn
Rapids:

[https://map.what3words.com/help.driver.lost](https://map.what3words.com/help.driver.lost)
[https://map.what3words.com/driver.lost.help](https://map.what3words.com/driver.lost.help)

It's a scam. The media should really stop repeating press releases.

~~~
mtmail
If you mix up words or misspell a place one usually ends up somewhere
unplanned. 600km between Springfield, Texas (Jim Wells County) and
Springfield, Texas (Anderson County). Half around the world if you mistype a
coordinate (or mix up latitude and longitude or forget a minus sign).

~~~
aw3c2
Yes, wrong coordinates are much easier to detect. The 300km are too small to
be clearly wrong, imagine a package being delivered from the East Coast.

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yiyus
For non-Enlgish speakers, they have just substituted numbers with letters. And
for English speakers, I wonder if they will be willing to use it when their
business is in infected.shit.hole or something like that.

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mtmail
what3words hires language consultants (based on the jobs page) so less common
and longer words are in the middle of the Pacific for example. The word 'shit'
isn't in the dictionary though there's probably funny/insulting/unfortunate
combinations out there. A business can simply use a nearby 3-word code which
sounds better, I mean there are 8 other 3-word codes just 4m away.

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nkrisc
I think the one advantage this has over the usual GPS coordinates is it's
easier to communicate over various means than a long string of numbers.

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dalacv
This service looks interesting: [http://locate.world/](http://locate.world/)

~~~
Pamar
It still has problems with "closeness" \- here are two buildings close to
where I live, both on the same side of the same street, maybe 20m of distance
from door to door:

1SCQU7 TMWV1V

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SixSigma
My UK (previous) address

100 HD1 3BQ

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omonra
Mongolia is one of the 22 countries in the world that Britain did not invade,
so unfortunately they don't have the benefit of the British post code system
:)

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9653497/British-have-
inva...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/9653497/British-have-invaded-nine-
out-of-ten-countries-so-look-out-Luxembourg.html)

~~~
Pamar
I am an Italian expat. I know from first hand experience (i.e. by trying to
send a postcard to a friend) that some rural area of Sardinia do not have a
postal address (even if there is a house there, not a nomad's hut that can be
disassembled and moved).

Guess what? People living there can apply to have a P.O.Box at the closest
town, where you can send them any kind of stuff and they just have to go to
town (something they have to do regularly to shop at a supermarket or see a
doctor) and check if there is anything for them.

I am sure it worked fine in the past for a lot of other countries too, and
probably still does in places like NZ or Australia.

It also has the nifty advantage that even if you _do_ live in a nomad's hut
and so may happen to wander away from your original "address" of
case.nightmare.beige your post office will stay there, and your post will be
there, too, waiting for you to come and pick it up.

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jackweirdy
What's the revenue model?

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blaze33
From the article "Mongol Post, the country’s largest mail provider, has
licensed the system from What3Words"

Pricing page:
[http://developer.what3words.com/pricing/](http://developer.what3words.com/pricing/)

Interesting bit there: "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."

~~~
Pamar
So I googled Mongol Post and this comes straight from their homepage:

 _САНХҮҮГИЙН ТАЙЛАН, ТАТВАРЫН ТАЙЛАН ХҮРГЭЛТИЙН ҮЙЛЧИЛГЭЭ_

Therefore I go on what3worlds page, and they display prominently a pin at
coordinates _kicks.pasta.steer_ \- without touching anything else, I change
their site language... now the same pin is set at: _хуучныг.зүүлт.суурилах_
which according to Google Translator would be _existing-ones.necklace.based-
on_.

I think this will not work "flawlessly" as soon as you need it to identify a
point which is not in your own homeland.

