
Why Bother with What Three Words? - MagicAndi
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-words/
======
turc1656
The author didn't touch upon what I think is the biggest issue with this. I
can be pretty damn sure that 51.50799,-0.12803 is really close to
51.51799,-0.12803 and even closer to 51.50800,-0.12803 just by looking at the
numbers because they follow a decimal precision style location system.
However, I have no idea if mile.crazy.shade is next to mouth.award.bowl or if
they are 1,0000 miles apart.

If anything, they should have designed it such that it follows an IP style
system where you get more precise/specific with each period and the words more
to the left indicate a larger area and we drill down to other smaller areas
with each period. And you could make words in the specific section be similar
to things that are near it. For example, it could roughly translate to
state.town.subsection within a country. So mouth.award.bowl could be right
next to mouth.award.cup because cup and bowl are related.

Regardless, this is a shit system and I can't believe anyone even bothered to
create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this crap?

~~~
DoreenMichele
_Regardless, this is a shit system and I can 't believe anyone even bothered
to create it. Also, I've never heard of it prior to today. Who uses this
crap?_

From what I've read, it gets used by nomadic peoples and people where regular
postal addresses have not been established. So, for example, parts of
Mongolia.

I'm not arguing with you. Just answering your question.

I actually favorited your comment. I think it's very insightful. I have a
(useless -- er, unused) Certificate in GIS and still enjoy reading about map
stuff.

~~~
retroafroman
I remember they pitched Mongolia as a place this would be used, but I fail to
see how it actually would be. I haven't been back to Mongolia since this came
out, but I would bet good money that no one (besides whatever government
entity signed onto (bribed/schmoozed) the project) would use this. English
isn't that common among nomads that it would make any sense. Everyone knows
the Latin alphabet, but reading and writing is all in Mongolian Cyrillic, so
it doesn't even make sense that way.

In the cities (where the large majority of the population lives) in the
organized ger districts, there are street names and numbers, so this is really
a solution in search of a problem.

~~~
yoube
Not necessarily. While Ulaanbaatar does have street numbers and such, they're
not well-known and are basically never used when giving out
directions/advertising. It's more like: The "yellow building to the right side
of the big department store". Official addresses also rarely use street names,
it's more like: Flat #5, Apartment #2, Microdistrict #4, Sukhbaatar District.

So in reality everyone just uses Post Office Boxes for mail, who often just
call you and say mail's arrived and charge 400 tugrug.

That said, no-one I know has even heard about what3words, aside from those who
read the initial press release. And I'm from Mongolia.

~~~
gexcolo
Hey, weird ask, but I am going to be visiting Mongolia in 3 months with a
small group of online pals. Want to be friends? My email is on my profile!

------
mchannon
W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon
making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before
figuring out if you can afford their service.

I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium
component), with the following improvements over W3W:

•Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you
don't need to tack on extras. A 12-character code with the last two lopped off
will be imperceptibly close to the original.

•Precision optimized. Every additional character, no matter the value, will
result in a location not identical to the absence of that character.

•Precision-focused. When a location is precise to the nearest 100km, km, m, or
µm, the browser tools make that clear.

•Logic-optimized. With pencil and paper, you'll be able to figure out how to
go N, E, S, W by X distance by adjusting a particular character.

•Spheroid-optimized. The Mercator projection is often held to be an
imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and
longitudes use. Half the "namespace" of nearly every coordinate system is
biased toward the poles. The distance between 89° N, 10°W, and 89°N, 10°E is
38km, but at 1°N, it's 2226km. My system has a simple and clever way to
equally represent the dense equatorial regions and the sparse arctic and
antarctic regions, and that equals shorter codes.

Watch this space.

~~~
EGreg
Contact me: greg at the domain qbix.com

We are currently using geohash and curious why it’s worse than this.

~~~
mchannon
Geohash is easily the best system currently out there.

Worse might be a little harsh, but my system:

•Packs slightly more bits into the string (naturally there's a tradeoff with
data fidelity) for shorter strings

•Follows a completely logical alphanumeric distribution (Geohash will skip
letters, some for good reason, like o and l, and some for not-so-much, like a)

•Some of the other benefits in the original post are also missing.

You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow
everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have
everybody else know exactly where they mean.

~~~
alasdair_
>You could probably do this with other systems, but the goal is to allow
everyday people to be able to pack a short string in a tweet and have
everybody else know exactly where they mean.

89c25855b9b

That's the S2 string for a section of Times Square, NY.

Usefully "89c25855b" is a well-defined, less precise location comprising a
larger area. You can go up or down in levels of precision easily and
everything can be stored as a single 64-bit integer with lots of extremely
useful properties, (e.g. the use of the Hillbert Curve with all of it's
benefits, like localization in address space and real space - see
[http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-...](http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-
on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/))

If your system adds more benefits than this, I'd love to hear more about it!

------
velcrovan
There is another big problem with W3W that Terence doesn’t mention: it isn’t
scalar.

From another W3W-criticism blog post ([https://mwfrost.com/space-is-
scalar.html](https://mwfrost.com/space-is-scalar.html)):

“An addressing system is successful insofar as it enables us to execute the
suite of cognitive tasks that constitute navigation. Associating a destination
with its location on the earth is only one of these chores.

“If you have a powerful computer in your pocket, and you want to use your
brain to remember and then use your voice or a text message to share a
geographic location with someone else who also has a powerful pocket computer,
what3words has got you covered. If you want to infer how far that location is
from another location, or which roads might connect to it, you are out of
luck. Building an addressing system is difficult, expensive work specifically
because legitimate addresses embed so many levels of hierarchical categories
and scalar proportions for us. Remembering coordinate locations is cognitively
burdensome, but the signifiers retain some meaning relative to one another.
You can tell the search and rescue team that you’ve twisted your ankle at
ringleader.kilt.comedians, but as soon as you’ve moved 3 meters east, you’re
at since.duplicates.backswing, and the technologically-enhanced mnemonic
crutch has exhausted its usefulness. Augmenting one cognitive task in a manner
that debilitates the constellation of surrounding faculties is not the right
way to apply technology to our problems.”

~~~
hopler
I don't see the relevance of that complaint. People don't memorize their
current lat long to 16 sig figs either. You'd still need a gps device or a
paper map without w3w.

~~~
enticeing
I think the point is that ringleader.kilt.comedians and
since.duplicated.backswing have no relation at all to each other, and don't
communicate to the user their spatial relationship. On the other hand, you
could infer that 1234 W Something Rd is nearby 1238 W Something Rd.

EDIT: Also, given a set of lat/long coordinates, regardless of the precision,
you could infer their spatial relationship as well.

~~~
praptak
"you could infer that 1234 W Something Rd is nearby 1238 W Something Rd."

Don't overestimate that. There are nasty exceptions where the street
disappears and continues elsewhere without a significant gap in house numbers,
especially in cities with a long history.

~~~
saalweachter
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Being able to naively
navigate city -> street -> number is _incredibly_ useful, and that it is
occasionally broken doesn't make it an undesirable feature.

~~~
maxerickson
It's more than occasionally broken, there's billions of people living in spots
where it doesn't work.

~~~
bradstewart
Billions? You've found navigation by street number to be unreliable in 20+ %
of locations?

Either way, it does work for several billion other people.

~~~
maxerickson
I haven't personally found it to be the case, but I do know that people in
much of the developing world simply don't have/use street addresses like are
common in the "West".

~~~
moftz
Just because you use a system like W3W or even just lat/long for a rural
address in a developing country, doesn't really mean you will easily be able
to navigate to it. Many rural roads don't have names/numbers and may not even
be marked on mapping software. Navigating to these kinds of places takes local
knowledge (or at least a GPS, a recent topo map, and careful planning) to get
to.

------
adambyrtek
I inherited a property management system where previous developers used
what3words for storing location of homes (since reverse geocoding based on
address is not reliable in some countries we support).

However, after an internal review we realised that a lot of our UK properties
have locations in Asia or the US... It turned out that typos in what3words
often result in a valid location on the other side of the world. The most
common mistakes we found were plural words instead of singular ones (e.g.
"cats" not "cat") or the other way around.

Of course we could have improved the user interface or added some extra
validations, but at this point we realised that what3words is more trouble
than it's worth, and decided to migrate to storing lat/long directly. That
allowed us to avoid a third-party dependency and simplify the code, since we
had to cache lat/long anyway in order to plot properties on a map or calculate
distances between them.

~~~
Angostura
I imagine that a single digit typo in latitude could also result in a valid
location on the other side of the world

~~~
notahacker
Sure, but none of the numbers are homophones or even particularly easy to
confuse (in English, anyway) when giving a location verbally. W3W marketing
claims none of their words are either, but the evidence suggests otherwise...

Latitude errors are also much easier to correct if you incorrectly memorise it
but know other information (country/city). But if you find out that
arbitrary.word.cat gives you an obviously incorrect location, you've got very
little chance of realising that actually it must have been
arbitrary.world.cats

------
jpatokal
There are plenty of alternatives to W3W, most notably Open Location Codes:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code)

Alternatively, try a W3W parody:

[https://what3emojis.com/](https://what3emojis.com/)

[http://www.what3fucks.com](http://www.what3fucks.com) (NSFW text)

~~~
ajuc
The emojis one have the nice property that close addresses share some words.

~~~
aembleton
And the emoji one will work across languages.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Has anyone else tried to look up a location, find the emoji(s) for it and then
put the text for it back into the search bar? It seems to not do reverse
lookup, making it completely useless as far as I can tell. You can find the
emoji(s) for a place, but not a place that corresponds to the emojis.

~~~
bradknowles
Maybe that's a feature?

;)

~~~
DoreenMichele
I did think about posting my location for all the world to see, knowing that
it wouldn't tell anyone anything at all.

But then I thought "Maybe I just can't figure it out and other people can."

Thus the question. :P

~~~
saikofish
It definitely isn't a feature! We just never got around to putting it in!

I do take pull requests :D

~~~
DoreenMichele
I was going to try to submit a pull request, but it seems someone requested
this already:

[https://github.com/BadIdeaFactory/what3emojis/issues/10](https://github.com/BadIdeaFactory/what3emojis/issues/10)

 _Reversable #10

@asteres

asteres opened this issue almost 2 years ago

I don't see a way to lookup an address if I have 3 emoji._

------
timthorn
> Here's the thing... If the person's phone has a data connection - the web
> page can just send the geolocation directly back to the emergency services!

No need even for the data connection. Any Android 2.3.7+ or iOS 11.3+ phone
will automatically SMS the location when the emergency number is dialled.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mobile_Location](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mobile_Location)

~~~
imglorp
There's also a ton of E911 infrastructure already for exactly this problem
(USA, your number may vary!). It's not done at the user level and certainly
not by a third party.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1)

------
stuart78
W3W seems to me like it adds more confusion to finding places than it adds
clarity. The word choices involve tenses and plurals, which makes them seem
quite east to get wrong from memory. This is exhibited in two of the carousels
on their homepage:

* actors.asking.print * manage.mercy.items

Both plural nouns could easily be confused for the singular form, and when I
was typing the above, I in fact mixed it up on items.

I think the advantage of lat/long and plus codes is that they are more
obscure. They don't make the odd promise of being memorable.

With W3W codes, are we supposed to remember more than one of these? I know the
addresses of my parents and a few friends, but rely on mechanical storage for
all others. I understand the advantage of having a more universal way of
identifying precise locations, but don't see cute password-like names as a
helpful solution to that.

Let computers do what computers do well. which is store and quickly serve up
inscrutable bits of information.

~~~
bradknowles
They should be using something like the EFF's word lists:
[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-
random-p...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-
passphrases)

------
eruci
I've built an open source alternative, 3geonames.org.

The code is made up of 3 Geonames, with the first Geoname being the most
prominent location name in relation to actual geography, for eg:
[https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA](https://3geonames.org/LONDON-
ISUKI-LIPNITA) .

The 140k Geonames have a phonetic distance of at least 1 from each other.
Support for elevation and an app with voice geocoding is coming soon.

~~~
feb
A few weeks ago, I hoped 3geonames could become a standard. But it has some
painful limitations:

The system picks very unusual names. For example STOCARDA-KRRABA-SIPLA is in
Germany, but doesn't use the German name of the city. (For those wondering,
Stocarda means Stuttgart in Venetian according to Wikipedia.) That makes it
harder to use for locals and can hurt the feelings of people in some regions.
Also using cities of other countries can cause controversial codes, especially
for young and or small countries.

3geonames has to use a language for each name. This makes it hard for people
who don't speak that language to pronounce the words.

The 3geonames website describes the basic principles but there's no detailed
description on how to build those codes besides (a somewhat hard to read) Perl
script. For example, the documentation does not explain what encoding is used
exactly.

~~~
eruci
A new version will address the issue of local names. It will also solve the
problem of crossing national boundaries via the integration of OSM admin{}
polygons. And add support for elevation up to +-18000 meters.

The documentation is quite sparse, I agree. I hope to find some time to deal
with that also.

------
vr46
I had never heard of this until I read the criticism, maybe this is some kind
of corollary to the Streisand Effect.

Also, it looks right up there with Swatch Internet Time.

~~~
mirimir
I have a hard time believing that W3W isn't an early April Fools joke. I mean,
seriously?

And why three words? You only need two, unless you're coding altitude. And
damn, you already have two numbers (angles) with arbitrary precision.

And how does one calculate great-circle distances using their silly words?

~~~
NikkiA
The _3_ words are because 2 words doesn't give you enough bits of enumerated
data. The words aren't to be thought of as X,Y,Z, they're just 3 blobs of
bits, where each word represents something like a 0-200,000 range or
something.

~~~
mirimir
Huh? Maybe not two short words. But clearly, two numbers can be represented by
two words.

~~~
maxerickson
How many bits do you think it takes to precisely indicate a location on the
surface of the earth?

If you are using 2 angles, I guess the place to start is with the
circumference of the earth, which is 40 million meters. So to get within a
meter, you then need to encode your angle with enough precision to indicate a
single one of the 40 million possibilities.

~~~
mirimir
Ummm. That's what latitude and longitude are. Angles. Or equivalently,
radians.

And what's magic about one meter? Latitude and longitude can be arbitrarily
precise. But whatever. You want 40 million? Well, 360 degrees / 40 million ~
10^-5. That's easily handled by "43.63872, -116.24135".

~~~
maxerickson
Yes, it seemed you were arguing those two numbers could easily be encoded
using existing words.

If you want to make gibberish word like objects it's probably possible.

~~~
mirimir
But what's the point of that?

If they were _always_ the same two (or three) words, fine.

But if there are multiple such encoding systems, any set of three words
(foo.bar.baz) is ambiguous. Because it depends on the system being used.

So sure, someone might remember "foo.bar.baz". But "foo.bar.baz" in W3W might
be in SF. But in Hanoi by some other system.

And then we get to the need to pay W3W to generate those codes. That's crazy
bullshit.

~~~
NikkiA
TBF The maidenhead system (which is a worldwide standard) IS, IMO fairly easy
to remember.

And because it's pairs are increasing in area, I can state that I live in IO93
and it narrows it to:

[https://www.karhukoti.com/maidenhead-grid-square-
locator/?gr...](https://www.karhukoti.com/maidenhead-grid-square-
locator/?grid=IO93)

or I could give the next 2 characters to narrow it to a 1km x 1km (roughly)
area that covers my town, or the 2 letters and 2 numbers that give a small
area that pinpoints 2-3 houses on my street.

It's not really any more complex or hard to remember than a standard postal
code or zip code.

~~~
mirimir
Now _that_ sounds like a very useful system. It's hierarchical. With arbitrary
precision. With ~short, easy to remember (and easy to key/speak on radio)
codes. Nice.

------
LeoPanthera
I have always wondered why the Maidenhead Locator System did not catch on
outside of Amateur Radio.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System)

It converts geographic positions into short strings of characters, but
notably, a truncated string still points to the same location, just less
precisely.

For example, the ferry building in San Francisco is CM87TT20, but CM87TT is a
larger square that encompasses Treasure Island as well, and CM87 is most of
the bay area.

~~~
improbable22
Indeed it seems neat. And you will learn to ignore CM87 the way you (used to)
ignore phone area codes.

Although it looks like CM87tt20 only gets you within a km or so, does
CM87tt20aa get you down to a building?

~~~
LeoPanthera
Yes. Less than a building, in fact. CM87TT20SV is the front entrance.

------
coldtea
First of all, WTW seems like a BS solution in search of a problem that wont go
anywhere, anyway. So I don't see a reason not only to bother with them, but
even to be bothered by what they do. Even if needed, this is much better:
[https://plus.codes/](https://plus.codes/)

Second, a nit: "Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W
changes.".

Not "any tectonic activity" but the rare tectonic activity that keeps your
house number the same but changes your long/lat.

Third, another nit: "Numbers are fairly universal. Lots of countries use 0-9.
English words are not universal. How does W3W deal with this?"

They don't have to? Domain names are not universal either (even when they
added unicode after tons of years it has near zero adoption, plus
implementation issues in many browsers/client libs. Heck still today Chrome
shows the Poopla domain as mere punycode: [https://xn--ls8h.la/](https://xn--
ls8h.la/))

------
faho
One clarification, as a native german speaker:

>Or ///klartext.bestückt.vermuten - "cleartext stocked suspect"?

That's "suspect" in the sense of "guess" (as a verb), not in the sense of a
criminal suspect. (And "stocked" like a store shelf would be)

I'd call this example entirely benign.

------
jillesvangurp
W3w was a pretty nice idea and I know some people that have been involved with
the company. However, it is indeed not open. It's also VC funded which means
that openness is incompatible with making money for them. Which means that
most of its potential is lost or off limits unless you are a paying customer.
They have a few of those and have had some success doing deals with postal
services in countries that lack formal addresses or for use cases where formal
addresses are not that useful, like e.g. logistics or big public venues like
airports. But the closed nature of this of course holds back most of the
interesting use-cases.

For those who don't know, w3w simply encodes locations to 3 words using an
algorithm that translates coordinates into what is probably a quad tree path
(e.g. geohash) and breaks that into 3 chunks that get mapped to words. The
proprietary part is the algorithm and the mapping of words to these chunks
(mappings actually since they have them in several languages). Probably you
could reverse engineer the algorithm but then you run into the little problem
that the mapping is likely copyrighted, some patents may apply, etc.

There are some nice touches to the algorithm like e.g. associating
shorter/common words with the most relevant locations so that if you are
German speaking, the German version of the algorithm generates short codes
inside Germany and longer ones on the other side of the planet.

A couple of issues with w3w: the codes are not hierarchical. So you can't rely
on e.g. the first word denoting a bigger location; the second word denoting
locations inside that area, etc. Consequently, two almost identical locations
will have completely different words associated with them. So you can't at a
glance tell where any combination of words is unless you run the algorithm.
They are easy to remember but meaningless.

Open location codes and Geohashes are similar except they don't provide easy
to remember human readable codes, which is the reason why neither is commonly
used by consumers. However, I've always liked geohashes because things with
the same prefix are in the same place, which is awesome if you need to build
search engines (though more efficient ways of doing that are available). With
7 or 8 letters you get pretty good accuracy with those and the algorithm for
encoding and decoding is pretty simple. OLC is similar but stays closer to the
degrees/minuts/seconds notion. Also the codes are longer.

~~~
0xffff2
>(though more efficient ways of doing that are available)

Would you mind expanding on that? This topic piqued my interest because I've
recently found myself using Geohashes to lookup nearby objects and I'm
wondering if there's something better that I should be doing.

~~~
jillesvangurp
lucene used to have a geohash backed way of doing location search. They since
switched to quadtrees that are binary encoded and added adding custom encoders
to lucene for supporting this in recent versions.

I actually implemented search using simple geohashes indexed as terms back in
the day. It works but this is way better.

------
screentearer
This strategy of for-profit companies masquerading as open-source advocates is
really common in science as well.

For instance, based on advertising from the ACS (American Chemical Society,
the largest scientific organization in the world by membership), you would
expect they are advocates of collaboration among chemists. In reality they
will sue anyone that tries to store or distribute their standard for chemical
identifier numbers (CAS#).

------
toss1
"superficially simple solution to a complex problems" \--- Exactly this

While it might initially seem a bit easier to remember words vs numbers, W3W
is a non-solution in many ways, many nicely described in the article.

Most critically, the W3W indicators have zero relation to actual geography.
Adjacent locations have entirely different quasi-random identifiers -- there
is no progressive gradation, and no indication whether two locations are
adjacent or on different continents.

It does not scale, and leaves us completely dependent on a data connection and
their servers to navigate.

There is also no way to figure it out from known principles. The entire system
has many points of failure. With a street address, I can know which way to
from seeing a couple of existing addresses; W3W - no way, need a data
connection.

With Lat-Long I immediately know what part of the world I'm in, and what
direction I need to move to move to get closer to my target. A GPS unit, or a
simple compass and map will work great. W3W -- zero clues, and need a data
connection to them.

Horrible, non-scalable, non-solution looking for a problem.

Massive marketing attempting to overcome bad technology.

------
gowld
Google Plus is dead. Long live Plus Codes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code)

------
NikkiA
On top of those reasons.... It's already a long-ago solved problem:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System)

~~~
darkstar999
To be fair, W3W and similar projects have a lot more friendly and memorable
addresses than this.

------
jccalhoun
Mostly off topic: I would like a URL shortener that uses a similar system so
that instead of giving me small.url/b3DmQ it would be small.url/MouseHatDoor
because I will sometimes share a link with my students and there is always one
student who can't get it to work because they type it wrong or something. I
can send them the link through a course announcement but it is more convenient
to put a short url on screen and have them go there.

~~~
HALtheWise
[http://yellkey.com](http://yellkey.com) is designed for exactly this use
case, and is near-exact clone of the now defunct
[http://shoutkey.com](http://shoutkey.com) that was prevalent at our school
for this. It provides single-word short URLs that expire after 24 hours, which
is fine in practice for any in-person use case.

~~~
jccalhoun
nice. I have looked for url shorteners but didn't find this one. thanks!

------
rodw
W3W feels a lot like Swatch .beats [1]. It's not exactly solving a problem the
doesn't exist, but I think solution is at least as bad as the problem we
started with.

At least .beats had the excuse of being a marketing gimmick, or so I assume.
No one really thought millidays-since-midnight-GMT was a reasonable
alternative to time-zones or just UTC time, right?

What is the problem that W3W is intended to solve? The idea is that I'll
describe a location via W3W coordinates rather than by address (or lat/lon)?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)

------
TimTheTinker
I work for Esri, a pretty large GIS company. From where I sit, I think W3W's
idea could be implemented better in less than a week, and then plugged into
existing GIS workflows as needed.

I suspect some large company or consortium like OGC will eventually build
something similar using a geographic coordinate system like WGS84 instead of
Mercator, and release it as an open database (perhaps with an open API and an
open-source reference implementation). At that point W3W would only continue
operating because of vendor lock-in to their proprietary named grid cell
database.

(Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. I don't speak for my employer.)

------
pickled_onion
I once thought about W3W like a DNS. Registered companies and businesses could
purchase a "number plate" e.g. "jakes.superior.plumbing" and then keep that
number plate on a subscription basis, much like owning a domain name. If the
business moved address, the geographic coordinates could be updated in the
back-end so that "jakes.superior.plumbing" always resolved to the correct
location. This, I thought, would be a great monetization strategy and
beneficial to many businesses. Even for folks who live in e.g. Dubai or rural
areas where there there has been no proper addressing strategy from the
municipal side, to be able to purchase a "name" of 3 words or whatever, in
order to be found easily - would be hugely beneficial. Furthermore, instead of
the 3 words being hard-coded to a specific cell on a world-grid, you take the
name with you. If you move house, or move business, just change the
coordinates and keep the name. I did mention this to W3W management when I
spoke with them in past dealings; they brushed the idea off as useless because
they didn't have the means or capacity to maintain a changing directory of
names/coordinates. Or perhaps they just thought my idea was silly compared to
their approach of dividing the world into trillions of cells and giving each
cell an identifier.

------
manishsharan
I am not familiar with this company but I find what they are doing almost as
funny as the Indiana Pi Bill .
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill)

------
huffmsa
I'm trying to understand it, but I can't.

Latitude and longitude can be used without an internet connection if you can
get a GPS signal.

If you're a boy scout or doomsday prepper or 1800s explorer who fell through a
wormhole, and have a bit of time, you can use the sun, stars and a makeshift
compass to get a good ballpark.

It's a system which only requires you and your counterpart to both accept the
contract of the coordinate system.

As many others here have pointed out _fuzzy.enlarged.testicles_ doesn't mean
anything unless we both have access to W3W, and then the directions which come
from me needing to get from _hairy.baked.potato_ to you at
_fuzzy.enlarged.testicles_ uses GPS. Because giving someone a print out of all
the W3W plots they need to pass through is useless, because those phrases
don't mean anything, because the system isn't contiguous or addressable.

It'd be like every house on a street having a different, non-contiguous
number, different name and different postal code (134 wallaby 53217 next to
5678 futon 44444). Or for the Londoners, if the postal districts didn't
increase as you moved outward.

It's a bad design with too many assumptions.

~~~
huffmsa
Or for you mathamatican, it's as if every square on a Cartesian plane had some
arbitrary value assigned to it.

------
newaccoutnas
All you need is [https://what3emojis.com](https://what3emojis.com)

~~~
testplzignore
> If you are unhappy with the emoji you are assigned you can reserve custom
> emoji markers for your triangle for only a low, lifetime price of $24.99.*
> Custom emoji can be any length (except three), up to the VARCHAR limit set
> in our MySQL database.

Awesome.

------
iheartpotatoes
I love tech startups: Longitude and lattitude have worked fine for centuries
(well, ever since clocks became reliable enough, that is!). So let's...
disrupt it? ...with something less intuitive? ...and proprietary? Typical VC
mentality! Shut these jokers down.

------
car
Another blast from the past: the SRI dotgeo initiative, ca. 2000:

[http://www.ai.sri.com/dotgeo/](http://www.ai.sri.com/dotgeo/)

They proposed cuteness like this:

 _Default Brand Name (short for "default cell server brand name"): the special
brand name, such as "mercury," "venus," "earth," "moon," "mars," that denotes
the default GeoRegistry for a planet. Other cell server brand names always
refer to the planet Earth._

------
ltbarcly3
There is so much "righteous indignation" in this thread!

I get that this Three Words thing might not be perfect, but a lot of the
criticisms in the posting are nonsense. The furthest anything moved in the
Japan earthquake was around 2.5 meters. Why act like this is some kind of deal
breaker? If you had used latitude and longitude it would still be wrong by 2.5
meters if you didn't update it after the quake.

Some people had an idea, built it out, and everyone here is losing their
minds, I don't get it?

~~~
rtkwe
2.5 meters is a problem in W3W. The squares are 3mx3m so most things are going
to change "location." Combine that with the nonlocality of the W3W encoding
and suddenly anything used has a completely different 'address' where with
traditional latitude and longitude 2.5 meters doesn't drastically change.

~~~
ltbarcly3
So you just keep using the old address code or words or whatever, I really
don't understand why this is a problem. What is going to happen if people come
looking for you and you are 2.5 meters to the left of where they show up? Your
original geolocation is almost certainly less accurate than 2.5 meters to
begin with, no matter how you specify it. Add to that the fact that if it's a
physical location with geographical extent, like say a building that is more
than 5 feet across, you are arbitrarily picking your location from within all
the possible locations that fall inside that building.

------
beagle3
With respect to the word list being non-language-neutral, possibly offensive,
etc - there was an old Mnemonic encoding project, the original gone but many
other mirrors (e.g. [https://powershellexplained.com/2017-03-25-mnemonic-
wordlist...](https://powershellexplained.com/2017-03-25-mnemonic-wordlist/) )
which is essentially perfect for these kinds of encodings.

It's not a standard, but it should be.

------
vortico
Does anyone have a list of patents What3Words has?

Regardless, this service solves a problem that does not exist whatsoever. My
guess is they will go out of business in a few years.

~~~
runn1ng
It does exist in developing nations, where street names change very quickly
and are not very reliable (and the rusty government can't keep up with the
quick development). First hand experience, Vietnam - I currently live in a
street that wasn't there a year ago and isn't in Google Maps. If you put it
into Google, it will send you to another place, 200 meters away. (They are
getting better fast, compared to Apple Maps for example which suck
hilariously, but still isn't perfect.)

You _can_ share a long/lat, or a link to Google Maps, but that's hard to write
down.

So it's a problem.

~~~
intertextuality
That's what Plus Codes appear to be aimed at. And it's open source.
[https://plus.codes/](https://plus.codes/)

------
skywhopper
I'd never heard of this place, but based on the staffing ratios in evidence on
their "team" page
([https://what3words.com/team/](https://what3words.com/team/)), the vast
majority of the company is in "partnerships", "growth", "business
development", and "marketing".

------
rurp
The US (as well as other countries) has had a grid mapping system for hundreds
of years[0]. It's just way less useful than GPS. The only time I've seen PLSS
used over GPS is for legacy reasons.

[0] Public Land Survey System
[https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/a_plss.html](https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/a_plss.html)

------
thelittlenag
The startup I'm working with offers a much better solution. We call it a
geohash phrase. Instead of three random words, where plurals and order matter,
instead we map geohashs to 5-word tuples that easily form a phrase. Moreover,
the words will only ever appear in one slot of the tuple, and pluralization
and word order don't matter.

You can find more at our website: qalocate.com

------
aagha
I've always thought that one of the ways to stop such stupid ideas/companies
is to follow the money and potentially black-list the VC's that are helping to
propagate a bad idea.

Digging into this on Crunchbase, it turns out that some of the funders behind
W3W are HUGE names[0,1]:

* Intel

* Daimler

* Sony

To me, this lends credence to the idea that many investors are either just in
it for the money--despite what their mission statements say, or just plane
stupid.

0 -
[https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/...](https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/organizations/num_investors/what3words)
1 -
[https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/...](https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/organizations/num_lead_investors/what3words)

------
tgsovlerkhgsel
There are so many competing systems because the problem of turning two numbers
(a coordinate pair) into a string is trivial, so everyone comes up with their
own bikeshed.

The individual details of the systems don't really matter. Sure, they each
have some small advantage or disadvantage, and you can argue about them for a
long time, but in the end, what matters is usage/adoption.

A widespread but suboptimal system is better than a system with better
properties that few people know/use, because the differences barely matter.

Unfortunately, there isn't sufficient need for such a system that ordinary
people would regularly come into contact with it, and any group of people that
does have such a need already found a (proprietary) solution, so it's unlikely
we'll get a standard soon unless big players agree on one and aggressively
push for it.

------
cyode
When I first learned about W3W, I immediately wondered if this same process of
mapping n-word tuples across a discrete space could be applied to time.
Similar to GPS coordinates, Unix timestamps like 1293432531 don't communicate
much to a human developer about when in history they occur. Just use
2010-12-26 22:48:51 then, right? Sure, but then my brain has to worry about
timezones, DST, etc. I feel like a unique English name for each second could
be useful in some cases, like 1293432531 but (easier, to, pronounce).

Of course a lot of the shortcomings about W3W would apply to to this system
too (offensive phrases, lack of relation between nearby points, etc.) Anyone
know of something, open source or otherwise, that exists?

------
chris_overseas
I agree with the author that using W3W for locating people in trouble is
ludicrous, yet it appears to be real:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912)

~~~
adblair
Can anyone suggest why the Advanced Mobile Location system discussed above
wasn't used in this situation?

------
mc_lovin_
How w3w solves the emergency problem ?

In case of an emergency you go to a link and read out your location.

If the gps is enabled shouldn't the location of the person in need be
automatically logged when he opens the link ?

Why should he even say the name of the location ?

------
zerogvt
That -apart from being a brilliant idea- seems to be easy to replicate in open
source software. Replicate not in being compatible but as a different system
altogether. Or has that already happened?

~~~
eruci
Yes. I've built one of them. [https://3geonames.org](https://3geonames.org) .
Open source. Works offline. No database is needed. Based on geonames.org.

I also know of at least 2 other open source alternatives (what3ducks and
what3fucks).

~~~
mcguire
It's weird that I'd never heard of this before, but there seems to be a
vibrant community of parodies.

~~~
eruci
I think it is an important problem since it has gotten the attention that it
has.

------
scythe
Isn't the algorithm for this trivial? Convert the lat-long to a single number
by Z-order (Hilbert curve if you like pain), optionally use xor and bit-
rotations (which are both bijective) to scramble it, then divide it into
chunks and lookup in a dictionary. How do you sell that to an investor who
knows how to code?

(It can be made hierarchical, just chunk the lat-long first!) (Just clean the
dictionary of any homonyms!) (You can get error correction by XORing the three
word indexes together to generate a check word!)

------
EGreg
I was friends with this kid and I will associate Three Words with him instead!

[https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-
mark-b...](https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-bao-
meet-the-18-year-old-entrepreneur-behind-threewords-me/amp/)

------
benatkin
Wow, the entrance to the coffee shop I'm currently sitting in is "anyone mock
grid". So I guess anyone can make fun of their grid? :D
[https://map.what3words.com/anyone.mock.grid](https://map.what3words.com/anyone.mock.grid)

------
HenryBemis
42 Acacia Avenue? I take it that Terence wanted to write 22, but was afraid of
Iron Maiden's lawyers? :)

------
talking_panda
Oh interesting I just got to know about w3w from this post. I agree with the
criticisms about it not being an open standard.

But the idea sounds interesting. I won't be using it anytime soon, but I can
see it can be useful to Ron Swanson who hides his gold arbitrarily under trees
in forest. :)

------
doctorRetro
So W3W is effectively domains for lat/lon and/or street addresses. This feels
like an idea trying desperately to justify it's existence. Or to paraphrase,
the answer to a question no one asked. Reviewing the critiques of this concept
only seem to reinforce that.

------
FrozenVoid
I was reading on w3w in 2017 and thought its better expressed as syllables
instead of arbitrary wordlists: [http://void.wikidot.com/methods:4syllable-
locations](http://void.wikidot.com/methods:4syllable-locations)

------
_kst_
"If we, what3words ltd, are ever unable to maintain the what3words technology
..., then we will release our source code into the public domain. We will do
this in such a way and with suitable licences ..."

What are "suitable licences" for the public domain?

------
car
This reminds me of RealNames(.)com. To their excuse, this was back in the
crazy Internet days.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames)

------
kowdermeister
Our office location had a square named: [boom,bedroom,gagging]

~~~
nuklearwanze
I guess that's exactly what they are after: funny (or otherwise "engaging")
three word combinations that are: (a) easy to remember, and (b) promote their
service. - the default square when looking up the town i live in is
leber.abhilfe.schnell (german), translated "liver, relief, quick", so maybe
that's what their algorithm is optimized for?

Either way, the whole system seems pretty stupid: why 3x3m (way to high res
for normal street addresses, much to coarse for anything else)? what is the
problem supposed to be that W3W wants to solve? I sure dont see it...

location data is usually not shared verbally but sent via some kind of text
medium - you just send GPS-coordinates from another (map-)app directly through
your email/messaging-app. seems simple enough.

~~~
Anderkent
>location data is usually not shared verbally but sent via some kind of text
medium - you just send GPS-coordinates from another (map-)app directly through
your email/messaging-app. seems simple enough.

So in one setting I have to email myself a link to get the map on another
device. In the other I just type three words from one screen into my phone.

I wonder which one's more convenient.

~~~
aembleton
you could scan a QR code from your phone

~~~
Anderkent
That also seems more effort than typing three words to me TBH, but I guess
there YMMV

------
AcerbicZero
So this is a worse implementation of the German Navel Grid System, taken a few
layers deeper, and without the contextual value of an actual grid?

Looks like Lat/Long win again.

------
xondono
Maybe it’s because english is not my native language but, how does it do with
spelling?

Are now-sphere-dew and now-sphere-due two distinct locations? Are they at
least close enough?

~~~
improbable22
I think they are likely to be both valid, but are deliberately far apart.

So you don't get a checksum; perhaps if you are typing your own address in and
are shown a map you will wonder why it's showing Timbuktu... but if someone
else's address is in the middle of Siberia you won't know how to correct it.

------
jasonhansel
Idea: phones could have a feature to send your location as a series of DTMF
tones. If standardized, that would be great for any service that needs your
location.

------
nojvek
Yeah what 3 words is a pretty dumb engineering as author pointed out.

If you just want to make it easier to remember numbers, just convert them to a
pronounceable base.

Like bacadamafuge

------
chengiz
What Three Words always seemed like a stupid idea to me. Not much thinking
beyond: Locations need bits, English words have bits, Let's use one for the
other. Addresses already work. Cellphones have GPS. It seems like an idea for
a problem that doesnt exist. What next, mapping words to phone numbers?

------
Kiro
All these ideas are doomed to fail. No-one will ever use them.

------
hartator
To be fair, I haven’t heard about W3W until this post.

~~~
glonq
Ditto, and I've worked with GIS for over a decade.

Heard of plus codes, though. Which is definitely what I'll use if/when I need
something more human-friendly than lat&lon.

------
daveheq
This is the first time I've heard of this and I don't know why people would
use it... there's no pattern to the word-locations; at least a grid has a
pattern.

------
manifestsilence
This idea of mapping words over an information space seems to be floating
about quite a bit in recent years. I was inspired by the XKCD about the
superiority of passphrases (Correct Horse Battery Staple) and have thought of
a handful of other applications that are more relevant than GPS location for
word mapping. It's the wrong application of a generally great (but not novel)
idea.

------
RocketSyntax
this is an april fools joke, right?

------
nsxwolf
Lost me at "The world is a sphere"

~~~
ungzd
1) It has link to "Oblate spheroid".

2) On Google Maps and almost all other popular maps on the web, Earth is a
sphere, see EPSG:3857

~~~
slavik81
Of course, the Earth is not really an oblate spheroid, either. That's just a
slightly more accurate approximation than a sphere. A quick look out the
window reveals that the Earth is bumpy, covered in valleys, hills and
mountains that are not included in the ellipsoid description.

As they say, "all models are wrong, but some are useful." The trick is to
choose the simplest model that works. The right one to use depends on what
you're using it for.

------
make3
the weepy.lulls.emerge thing is really terrible

------
titanix2
I’ve assisted to a speech/demonstration by an employee in my lab and while the
system was nice in principe the non-openess and internationalization let me a
meh impression. It is used in Mongolia by the country post so it addresses a
real problem but concerns rising in the blog post are real.

------
daedlanth
Aaah, no. Thanks.

------
winter_blue
What are some better (more open, reliable) alternatives to sharing
latitude/longitude-based locations? (Note: I'd never heard of What 3 Words
before coming across this post.)

------
asow92
Why don't you just make an open alternative is this is so disconcerting to
you?

~~~
IshKebab
Google maps now includes plus codes which are open so I don't think W3W stands
a chance anyway. Not should they. It's an idea you can implement in half an
hour. It doesn't need to be a commercial business.

~~~
Anderkent
I'd still rather remember/type/say three words than something like 5P56+4Q.
I'm really surprised that no one thinks pronounciability has value.

~~~
glonq
Words do have value, but what W3W takes away from you (money!) has _more_
value.

~~~
Anderkent
It's free for everything I need as an end user AFAICT. How does it take away
money?

~~~
IshKebab
Apparently they charge for API usage. If it became popular you would be paying
for it (indirectly).

