
What3words, the GPS app that can find anyone anywhere - camtarn
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/23/the-gps-app-that-can-find-anyone-anywhere
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realusername
I'm not a huge fan of their service for copyright reasons, they don't publish
a database of the words ([https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-
us/articles/207769875](https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-
us/articles/207769875)) and the whole thing is copyrighted so you can't reuse
it. It makes it pretty much useless as an universal address system for this
reason.

Also on the downsides, I don't know for other languages but in French the
words are NOT common words and a good half of them would require a dictionary
for a native speaker, making the address system useless.

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lifthrasiir
Moreover it is absolutely not locality sensitive, rendering the whole system
into a proprietary hashing algorithm. Probably the localization is pretty much
the only element I agree to be good to have, but I believe it's likely that
some word pairs are in the same synset for some languages, even though I'm not
really in a position to evaluate its wordlists.

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Findus23
I'm not sure I understand their idea of localization.

The center of Vienna is "decays.jump.graver" (if those are simple words is
questionable).

But when I switch to German the same block becomes
"fahrende.hügeligen.ansprüche" (driving, hilly, demands). So the words I get
by default are again just random strings for someone who doesn't speak German)

And even someone who speaks German may get the inflection of the words wrong
and end up in "fahren.hügelig.ansprüche", "fahrend.hügelige.ansprüche" or any
other permutation of the many ways the same word could be written in another
context.

And worst of all, all those permutations exist and map to other locations
somewhere on earth.

~~~
lifthrasiir
You are correct, it's a horrible implementation of an otherwise good idea.

Personally I want a public domain list of 2^k distinct words of distinct and
unambiguous enough meanings, that are then translated to many other languages
and evaluated for the same criteria (in reality, such system will be required
to begin with as many languages as possible). My best guess is that k=10 is
possible with a lot of efforts.

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edent
This is an advertorial - paid for by W3W.

> Tim Adams travelled to South Africa as a guest of what3words and Gateway
> Health

In reality, they have a closed, proprietary algorithm. They charge for usage.
They are the sole arbiters of what goes on there. They have weak
internationalisation.

Hell of a PR team though.

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eliaspro
"plus codes" [1] are a far better approach:

\- no language involved, only ASCII chars and + signs

\- open source algorithm to derive location codes

\- works completely offline, as codes are generated on-the-fly

\- no central DB of statically defined keywords needed

\- no dependency on a company which might go bankrupt at some point or change
licensing terms at will

W3W looks to me more like a strategic sell-out - implementing an already
existing idea, hype it up, cooperate with some big brands (e.g.
Daimler/Mercedes-Benz [2]), sell it for profit…

[1] [https://plus.codes/](https://plus.codes/)

[2] [https://blog.daimler.com/en/2018/03/28/what3words-
mercedes-b...](https://blog.daimler.com/en/2018/03/28/what3words-mercedes-
benz/)

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reustle
What3words is a proprietary licensed database that should be public/free.

~~~
onion2k
It's a very useful service, and there are some strong arguments why it should
be free, but getting people to actually adopt a standard is _really hard_. It
takes a lot of effort, time and money. Without the possibility of revenue it's
very likely no one would ever have funded it, so it would never have happened.

It'd have been nice if W3W was the product of a foundation like Mozilla, but
it's not. There's no reason to begrudge the founders wanting to turn it in to
a business.

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tebbers
This is basically like DNS for latitude/longitude coordinates. Pretty cool if
you think how revolutionary DNS was in making the web much more accessible. If
this has the same impact then it will be spectacularly successful.

Although it will be interesting to see how they can make money out of it given
it is a closed model and how that conflicts with bringing its benefits to poor
communities.

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rsre
I used to find funny that my old school What3words was
stress.cheat.mixture[0]. I guess that represents the feeling of studying
Telecom Engineering quite right.

0\.
[https://map.what3words.com/stress.cheat.mixture](https://map.what3words.com/stress.cheat.mixture)

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bcaa7f3a8bbc
> _“When someone asked where you lived, it would be like trying to remember
> your wifi router password.” That’s when this idea of three words came up. A
> bit of maths proved it was possible. “With 40,000 recognisable dictionary
> words, you have 64tn combinations, and there are 57tn squares.”_

Sounds like Diceware.

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

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UncensoredR
I think this is a great idea and it sounds remarkably like what DNS servers do
for IP addresses. Could we modify DNS servers to provide this information (and
potentially better localize it--like how country TLDs are controlled by given
countries)? I think could also be very helpful for kids or the elderly in the
US--they could remember a phrase much easier than their full address.

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throwawayqdhd
The problem with this approach is of course language limitations.

Can we bypass this with a combination of numbers and universal symbols?

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edent
Numbers are not universal. In that 8 can be represented as Ⅷ, ב, ၇, 八 etc.

But I like your idea of a mapping system based on emoji :-)

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wingerlang
Except not all devices show emojis, and the discrepancy between symbols across
operating systems. Not to mention, how do you even explain (say) some of them?

