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.<p>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.<p>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?
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.<p>I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W:<p>•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.<p>•Precision optimized. Every additional character, no matter the value, will result in a location not identical to the absence of that character.<p>•Precision-focused. When a location is precise to the nearest 100km, km, m, or µm, the browser tools make that clear.<p>•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.<p>•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.<p>Watch this space.
There is another big problem with W3W that Terence doesn’t mention: it isn’t scalar.<p>From another W3W-criticism blog post (<a href="https://mwfrost.com/space-is-scalar.html" rel="nofollow">https://mwfrost.com/space-is-scalar.html</a>):<p>“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.<p>“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.”
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).<p>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.<p>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.
There are plenty of alternatives to W3W, most notably Open Location Codes: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code</a><p>Alternatively, try a W3W parody:<p><a href="https://what3emojis.com/" rel="nofollow">https://what3emojis.com/</a><p><a href="http://www.what3fucks.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.what3fucks.com</a> (NSFW text)
> 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!<p>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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mobile_Location" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Mobile_Location</a>
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:<p>* actors.asking.print
* manage.mercy.items<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Let computers do what computers do well. which is store and quickly serve up inscrutable bits of information.
I've built an open source alternative, 3geonames.org.<p>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:
<a href="https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA" rel="nofollow">https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA</a> .<p>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.
I had never heard of this until I read the criticism, maybe this is some kind of corollary to the Streisand Effect.<p>Also, it looks right up there with Swatch Internet Time.
I have always wondered why the Maidenhead Locator System did not catch on outside of Amateur Radio.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System</a><p>It converts geographic positions into short strings of characters, but notably, a truncated string still points to the same location, just less precisely.<p>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.
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: <a href="https://plus.codes/" rel="nofollow">https://plus.codes/</a><p>Second, a nit: "Their grid is static, so any tectonic activity means your W3W changes.".<p>Not "any tectonic activity" but the rare tectonic activity that keeps your house number the same but changes your long/lat.<p>Third, another nit: "Numbers are fairly universal. Lots of countries use 0-9. English words are not universal. How does W3W deal with this?"<p>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: <a href="https://xn--ls8h.la/" rel="nofollow">https://xn--ls8h.la/</a>)
One clarification, as a native german speaker:<p>>Or ///klartext.bestückt.vermuten - "cleartext stocked suspect"?<p>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)<p>I'd call this example entirely benign.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This strategy of for-profit companies masquerading as open-source advocates is really common in science as well.<p>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#).
"superficially simple solution to a complex problems"
--- Exactly this<p>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.<p>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.<p>It does not scale, and leaves us completely dependent on a data connection and their servers to navigate.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Horrible, non-scalable, non-solution looking for a problem.<p>Massive marketing attempting to overcome bad technology.
Google Plus is dead. Long live Plus Codes.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code</a>
On top of those reasons.... It's already a long-ago solved problem:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System</a>
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.
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.<p>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?<p>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)?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time</a>
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.<p>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.<p>(Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. I don't speak for my employer.)
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.
I am not familiar with this company but I find what they are doing almost as funny as the Indiana Pi Bill . <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill</a>
I'm trying to understand it, but I can't.<p>Latitude and longitude can be used without an internet connection if you can get a GPS signal.<p>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.<p>It's a system which only requires you and your counterpart to both accept the contract of the coordinate system.<p>As many others here have pointed out <i>fuzzy.enlarged.testicles</i> doesn't mean anything unless we both have access to W3W, and then the directions which come from me needing to get from <i>hairy.baked.potato</i> to you at <i>fuzzy.enlarged.testicles</i> 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.<p>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.<p>It's a bad design with too many assumptions.
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.
Another blast from the past: the SRI dotgeo initiative, ca. 2000:<p><a href="http://www.ai.sri.com/dotgeo/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ai.sri.com/dotgeo/</a><p>They proposed cuteness like this:<p><i>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.</i>
There is so much "righteous indignation" in this thread!<p>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.<p>Some people had an idea, built it out, and everyone here is losing their minds, I don't get it?
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. <a href="https://powershellexplained.com/2017-03-25-mnemonic-wordlist/" rel="nofollow">https://powershellexplained.com/2017-03-25-mnemonic-wordlist...</a> ) which is essentially perfect for these kinds of encodings.<p>It's not a standard, but it should be.
Does anyone have a list of patents What3Words has?<p>Regardless, this service solves a problem that does not exist whatsoever. My guess is they will go out of business in a few years.
I'd never heard of this place, but based on the staffing ratios in evidence on their "team" page (<a href="https://what3words.com/team/" rel="nofollow">https://what3words.com/team/</a>), the vast majority of the company is in "partnerships", "growth", "business development", and "marketing".
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.<p>[0] Public Land Survey System <a href="https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/a_plss.html" rel="nofollow">https://nationalmap.gov/small_scale/a_plss.html</a>
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.<p>You can find more at our website: qalocate.com
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.<p>Digging into this on Crunchbase, it turns out that some of the funders behind W3W are HUGE names[0,1]:<p>* Intel<p>* Daimler<p>* Sony<p>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.<p>0 - <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/organizations/num_investors/what3words" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/...</a>
1 - <a href="https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/organizations/num_lead_investors/what3words" rel="nofollow">https://www.crunchbase.com/search/principal.investors/field/...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>A widespread but suboptimal system is better than a system with better properties that few people know/use, because the differences barely matter.<p>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.
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).<p>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?
I agree with the author that using W3W for locating people in trouble is ludicrous, yet it appears to be real:<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47705912</a>
How w3w solves the emergency problem ?<p>In case of an emergency you go to a link and read out your location.<p>If the gps is enabled shouldn't the location of the person in need be automatically logged when he opens the link ?<p>Why should he even say the name of the location ?
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?
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?<p>(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!)
I was friends with this kid and I will associate Three Words with him instead!<p><a href="https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-bao-meet-the-18-year-old-entrepreneur-behind-threewords-me/amp/" rel="nofollow">https://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-b...</a>
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 <a href="https://map.what3words.com/anyone.mock.grid" rel="nofollow">https://map.what3words.com/anyone.mock.grid</a>
Oh interesting I just got to know about w3w from this post. I agree with the criticisms about it not being an open standard.<p>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. :)
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.
I was reading on w3w in 2017 and thought its better expressed as syllables instead of arbitrary wordlists:
<a href="http://void.wikidot.com/methods:4syllable-locations" rel="nofollow">http://void.wikidot.com/methods:4syllable-locations</a>
"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 ..."<p>What are "suitable licences" for the public domain?
This reminds me of RealNames(.)com. To their excuse, this was back in the crazy Internet days.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealNames</a>
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?<p>Looks like Lat/Long win again.
Maybe it’s because english is not my native language but, how does it do with spelling?<p>Are now-sphere-dew and now-sphere-due two distinct locations? Are they at least close enough?
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.
Yeah what 3 words is a pretty dumb engineering as author pointed out.<p>If you just want to make it easier to remember numbers, just convert them to a pronounceable base.<p>Like bacadamafuge
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.)