What3Words submitting takedown requests against Tweets [pdf]
owenboswarva.com
owenboswarva.com
My question is, why would anyone commit to What3Words as a standard? There are much simpler ways to map geographic data to three-word combinations.
One obvious way, dividing things up into rough "squares" of approximately even size, has the added benefit that shared or alphabetically proximal words would indicate geographical proximity: with What3Words, wounds.client.face is feet away from to jumped.storm.nest, but hundreds of miles from wounds.client.fact.
If you don't think that's useful, then perhaps it's useful to use one of the other word lists which are on many computers, to share space, such as the PGP Word List[1] or the word list from RFC 1760[2]. One of the touted benefits of What3Words is that it is algorithmic and therefore doesn't require a large mapping file, so it's appropriate for systems where storage comes at a premium. Yet they used a more complicated algorithm and didn't reuse an existing word list?
It seems like their algorithm design was basically driven to try to make it hard to reverse engineer, and it didn't even achieve that. The only reason I can see why this became anything resembling a standard is that some people really want to pay for services.
Their PR attempts are absolutely pathetic but sadly seem to work on the masses. Their most frequent angle is someone contacting emergency services but somehow can't figure out his location, and W3W comes along and magically saves the day. The problem is that if I need a phone app & GPS signal to figure out my W3W, why can't I just use the GPS coordinates directly?
> The problem is that if I need a phone app & GPS signal to figure out my W3W, why can't I just use the GPS coordinates directly?
Think about verbal/handwritten transmission and mental/handwritten storage. It's not easy to transcribe "41.022755, -73.913102" or remember it. "medium.axed.hobby" is much easier. Copy/paste doesn't always work well on phones, and doesn't work at all across devices.
41, -73 (removed all decimals from your example location) still gives me the general location that it's somewhere in New York. My understanding is that removing a word from W3W completely invalidates it as it's like a hash.
Incomplete GPS coordinates can be augmented by other information. W3W doesn't look like it can, if your phone cuts out before you said the last word of your W3W to the emergency dispatcher you're screwed. If your phone cuts out before you said the last few decimals of the GPS coordinates the dispatcher still has a chance of finding you.
Two conflicting needs really - as it stands, W3W is incredibly good for simple transmission by voice, but it's awful for giving you clues to geographic proximity.
* pace, placed, plates, pays
* blush, plush, brushed, brushes
* crave, craved, chafe, safe
* inks, mink, pink, pinks, kinks, link, wink, winks, think, thinks, blink, brink, blinks, clinks, slinks, rinks, drinks
* yappy, happy, nappy, snappy, sappy, strappy, scrappy
I kind of just stopped searching for each of these groups, I'm sure there's more for each one.
If I can find sound-alikes this easily, just by probability there are going to be similar-sounding adjacent locations.
I'm also not convinced that geographic proximity versus transmission accuracy is a tradeoff we need to make.
One very simple solution would be to add an error-checking word, which is essentially a fast-hash of the first three words. I'm not convinced given what we know about memory with regard to numbers, that three words is somehow the ideal number--storing four words in short- or long-term is not noticeably harder to me.
census,senses
choral,coral
clairvoyance,clairvoyants
collard,collared
confectionary,confectionery
disburse,disperse
epic,epoch
equivalence,equivalents
hurdle,hurtle
incidence,incidents
incite,insight
incompetence,incompetents
independence,independents
innocence,innocents
instance,instants
intense,intents
lightening,lightning
ordinance,ordnance
overdo,overdue
parse,pass
pokey,poky
precedence,precedents,presidents
purest,purist
recede,reseed
sari,sorry
senses,census
variance,variants
verses,versus
EDIT: This is the script:
with open('word_data.txt') as f:
words = set(l.strip() for l in f.readlines())
with open('homophones.txt') as f:
for l in f.readlines():
l = l.strip()
homophone_group = (h.strip('*') for h in l.split())
filtered_homophone_group = tuple(h for h in homophone_group if h in words)
if len(filtered_homophone_group) > 1:
print(','.join(filtered_homophone_group))
I think it would be hard to overstate how useless this data is rounded that far. 41.022755, -73.913102 is almost a two hour drive away from 41, -73 according to Google Maps, and that "drive" starts with you swimming a tenth of a mile to shore. Even if you round better (round -73.913102 to -74) we're talking about a 6.9 mile drive that will take 15 minutes. With different examples (anywhere which is close to _.5 for both coordinates, i.e. -73.5, 41.5) the distances are going to be even larger.
Rounded to two decimal points, you're at a point where the accuracy is probably good enough for most purposes, but now you're looking at 41.02, -73.91, which is clearly harder to transmit over the phone than "medium.axed.hobby".
I guess you just described marketing. It's frustrating but if you want to sell to non-niche markets, you need to lower the standards to make it work.
EDIT: to be clear: I think there should be 3 distinct lists of 100 words, so that the set is order free.
The surface area of the earth is about 200 million sq miles, so 1 million unique points gets you 200 sq miles each, not 20. That's 5,575,680,000,000,000 square feet.
40,000 words per list (the length of the W3W list) gets you down to about a 87 square foot (around 9ft x 9ft) area with three words.
I tend to agree with you that 9ft x 9ft is smaller than necessary for most purposes. If we target a 16ft x 16ft area (5m x 5m for those using metric), we get that with three word lists of 28,000 words. Using six words (three nouns for general area, plus three adjectives for precision), word lists of 168 words are adequate.
I'm not completely convinced that the larger areas are ever useful, however. By going to just 4 words, we can achieve the 16ft x 16ft area with four lists of 2200 words. Those lists are short enough to plausibly check for sound-alikes, enough words exist to have four separate word lists, and have a shorter resulting location phrase.
I'm also not convinced that the set being order-free is really necessary. Transposition errors seem more likely in longer data sets than three words (hence even/odd word lists in the PGP word list).
TL;DR: A UK based startup "invented" a way to represent a lat/lng with three words. They patented it. Someone created whatfreewords.org, a clean room reimplementation and open sourced it. W3W's lawyers appears to be going to great lengths to ensure nobody finds out that it exists.
You can use the live demo (using the JS library) at https://whatfreewords.org/demo/
The API is down because our new generously-provided hosting does not support executing arbitrary code on the server. Without this provider the site would have been taken down again already, so we are grateful for what we've got.
Or is it only patented in the US?
Some of these are a blast too. dads.adjusted.cocktail is probably my favourite combo I've found so far.
Nope: describe.myself.touchy is my new favourite.
They're abusing the DMCA to shut down discussion.
It's nice when people produce free ads for a competing service, though doing it using DMCA takedowns is a bit weird. Be sure not to delete directions of people using your concept on Twitter, it would make it a bit dangerous to use!
If they had open-sourced it and tried to make some money off of being associated with it, the idea could perhaps have taken off. It's a reasonably clever and catchy idea, but not nearly valuable enough to make real money off of. It's exactly the kind of thing Google throws out for free to see if it catches on.
There are still problems with the idea of large tech companies deciding on an addressing system for the whole world (the entire concept of tech colonialism, for example), but Plus Codes are an undeniably better implementation and also freely usable.