About 5/6 years ago, a team of 2 South Africans got an idea, and called it Waytag, the # for locations. The idea was that you tag a location with whatever you want, e.g. bob.home, and anyone looking for it would use !bob.home.

They had grand ambitions of licensing it to Google and the like. They patented it in a few countries (though there was prior art).

Suffice to say, though they got a few companies involved, the idea fizzled into dust. I think in addition to bad implementation, the idea of license fees probably put people off using the system.

I'm also aware of W3W, as there's been some discussion about it here in HN. I've seen +codes for a while on Google, but I've never needed to use them, as they look unfriendly to the mind. I personally think they're not as memorable as W3W, but if they are made/kept as an open standard, maybe they'll take off.

Part of the problem is that many people who could benefit from codes in lieu of an address (I'm thinking informal settlements where there are no formal street names), might not directly be in reach of a mechanism to generate or use these codes.