What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m | Hacker News Reader

What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m

what3words.com

56 pointschristudor54 comments

Clever, but not very practical. Addressing and city/state/country names are very well ingrained into our culture and have real-world meaning. We can understand the general location of an address just by reading it. w3w takes all context out of location names, and forces you to map it with a tool. I don't see how that will improve anything.

As you can purchase a one word name for a specific location, this really just looks to me like someone trying to quickly make a buck with a clever idea, similar to the "milion dollar homepage".

If they did have a more meaningful intent, it is not communicated well enough for me to have received the message.

You're commenting from the perspective of someone who comes from a culture with addresses. Most of the world doesn't have addresses.

Try to go to a meeting in India. It typically involves three or four phone calls to find the place.

You really think most people live at locations without addressing systems? How can we even prove that?

The only locations I'm aware of that that is true are: very poor parts of Asia, Africa, India, and maybe some of the favelas of Brazil.

With essentially all of North America, South America, Europe, and much of China, along with all of Japan, Australia, being covered by an addressing system.

I'd wager 2/3 of all people live in a location with normal addresses.

It's the other way round - "two thirds of the world’s population is without a postal address,” Charles Prescott, Executive Director at the Global Address Data Association

50 or 60 countries have postal code or address databases which are kept reasonably current...’ ... ‘In the least developed countries, [address verification] may only mean that the city or town exists in that country.’- UNIVERSAL POSTAL UNION

“Over 50 percent of the world’s urban dwellers do not have access to named streets.” Catherine Farvacque-Vitkovic, World Bank

That's around 4 Billion people without an address.

There's a world of difference between "an addressing system" and one that is effective.

Try to go anywhere in India by using the address. You will find it challenging.

As a substitute for:

  10 Downing Street
  London, UK

... I see your point. However, as a substitute for:

  Latitude: 51.503363
  Longitude: -0.127625

... I would argue that "slurs.this.shark" is a significant improvement. (plus it's mildly entertaining!)

This is more accurate than old school addresses. 3x3 is interesting as its the space a single person would stand in. So for instance in delivering a pizza, I'm in the back/front yard - this is better.

I always felt just stringing together latlong works, and can already be instantly typed into google maps, etc.. 41.9483,-87.6556

Maybe a DNS like system that translates friendly names to this string of characters eliminating the need to remap the world and replace what latlong already gives us.

This is only tangentially related in that it's not using ordinary words. But GeoHash always struck me as a clever encoding for lat/lon pairs. Locations look like "u4pruydqqvj", so gibberish, but concise. The neat thing is geohash is a progressive encoding so you can lop off characters from the right and still be naming the same area, just less precisely. Ie while u4pruydqqvj is a specific point in Denmark u4pru is just sort of in the area of Denmark. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

Geohash looks brillant!

They got me all excited and yet left me hanging when it comes to finding out MY w3w address. Where's the link to look up my address and discover my 3 words?

What it's bad at:

- Sharing it with people. Where is snake.delta.chair? Dunno. It gives an offline human no info as to weather that address is even in their country. Normal addresses tell you the state, city, street name and other valuable info. W3w doesn't.

- It's not accurate. What about PO Boxes? Suites and apartment numbers? Duplexes? Office buildings? Skyscrapers? What if the w3w square has 2 or more houses on it? It's good for only rough estimate geo-coordinates.

- It simplifies the memorability of addresses, but destroys an addresses ability to be descriptive.

What's it perfect for:

Sharing your w3w address with computers. Geo mapping using human words rather than data coordinates. You can quickly leave your home / business geo-address on your photos (if you want your photos tied to your address and not the current GPS coordinates of your camera) or blog without having to remember a long string of number coordinates.

There's a lot to like about w3w, but note that the word->location mapping isn't open data, so think carefully before becoming too reliant on it.

Thanks for this comment.

Seems to me a localization scheme should be open if it ever hopes to get traction.

The biggest problem I see with these global addressing schemes is that they have nothing to do with the location, and they dont have any locality. Snake.Dog.Rabbit is in a location with no snakes, dogs or rabbits and is right next to Lamp.Chair.Guitar? Theres no visible logic to it. its just easier to say 123 River Road. By the name you know its likely to be near a river, and it will be right next to 124 River Road

But how many street names are actually related to the local geography? At least where I live - an old European country -, they're either based on the name of a more-or-less obscure dead personality (e.g. my street is named after a marquis from the 16th century) or after something that happened there decades or centuries ago (e.g. Merchants' street).

In Phoenix, Arizona the major streets vaguely relate to the location. The layout is a big grid (for the most part). The north-south streets are numbers and east-west streets are named (you need to memorize the order). There is a central avenue with street numbers increasing both east and west. "Avenues" are on the west side and "Streets" are on the east. Given the major cross streets it's pretty easy to find your way there.

I believe many Utah cities are more extreme than this with a grid and all street names being a number + a direction.

You're right though. These are the exception and not the rule.

There is no logic to the system, the only purpose it serves that I can tell is to make the owner wealthy by selling squares on a grid.

It makes me think of the million pixel homepage:

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

In concept it's the same model, but for a map.

Some users have asked to give an additional name to a square so we have allowed them to. However the 3 word system is being integrated into systems where data connections can't be guaranteed, as it is algorithmic, it's only 5MB big which can fit on a smartphone and display/receive 3 words, regardless of whether the user is connected. Available for any devs to use as an offline SDK. Error-detection and voice input are also optimised for the 3 word system. I would focus on the 3 word system.

That's true when the street address works. But in a lot of the world, street addressing is poor and occasionally non-existent. Also even in countries where street addressing works well, big areas (parks, beaches, stadium entrances, car park entrances) don't have street addresses and another simple referencing system can be helpful. what3words is a human-friendly version of GPS co-ordinates which are too long and impractical for everyday use by human beings.

Why even allow similar sounding words? Lamp and lamps?

I thought the whole point was to avoid ambiguity.

I wonder where there corpus of words comes from..?

Yeah, and you're one letter away from "oops, accidentally shipped my package to Australia"

It's much better to be so far away you know it's wrong at the searching stage, rather than 3 miles away as with similar postcodes, co-ordinates etc when you don't know it's wrong which often results in delays/wasted journeys.

It's much better still not to have the ambiguity. And a non-plural version of my home three words is in the same city, just the wrong side...

Well, they need about 38500 words, so it seems possible to do without having to use both "lamp" and "lamps", but it's probably not possible to avoid every pair of similar seeming words, eg "principle" and "principal".

All homophones are removed (where/wear, principle/principal) so that the system always works when people communicate a 3 word location by voice.

Yay my address, when translated from French, is something like "throat.shame.cutting". I'm eager to share it with friends!

Funny, they have a perfectly translated Dutch version they serve to me, it looks like a lot of effort and time has been put into this project.

Yeah, also a bit useless. I don't think many Dutch people exist that can't read English, or even that don't enjoy reading English. Those that don't most likely don't browse the web much either.

On the other hand, the same is not true of other countries, and it'd be weird to leave Dutch out just because they have more proficiency. The marginal cost is not that great.

I closed the page immediately, because they served a German version in spite of my http headers/explicit preferences, just because I happen to connect from Germany.

Poor form.

Their condusion-avoidance example is table-chair-lamp vs. table-chair-lamps.

Let's look at more singular/plural combinations.

http://what3words.com/tables.chair.lamp is close to Minneapolis

http://what3words.com/table.chairs.lamp pretty close to http://what3words.com/tables.chairs.lamp are on the east coast of the USA.

West coast: http://what3words.com/tables.chairs.lamps is close to http://what3words.com/table.chair.lamps, both are on the opposite side of the continent to http://what3words.com/table.chairs.lamps which is pretty close to http://what3words.com/tables.chair.lamps

Very confusing!

minneapolis tables.chair.lamp - between 1000 miles (east coast) & 2000 miles (west coast) of the below

west coast table.chairs.lamps - 194 miles - tables.chair.lamps

east coast tables.chairs.lamps - 340 miles - table.chair.lamps

Disclaimer - I work for what3words

This is stupid on so many levels. What about floors? 3m x 3m in a skyscraper can be an address of thousands of people. And why even allow the oceans?

Why not allow the oceans? The most common, shortest words are on land, the longest, least common words are reserved for the oceans, so the "land" 3 word combinations aren't affected at all by the inclusion of the oceans. For now, most navigation for everyone is based around a 2D map so, 2D is sufficient. If the world becomes fluent in 3D navigation, then there could easily be an optional extra parameter for height.

People use boats, and lat/lon coordinates are also sometimes useless without an elevation.

Great, my house is borderline inappropriate. Before seeing that, I thought this was a neat idea.

Similar precision can be achieved by using GPS coordinates with four (10 m accuracy) to five (1 m) decimal digits, sometimes even fewer depending on location as you don't need trailing zeroes.

The coordinate system is old, ubiquitous, and it's readability is similar to that of ipv4 addresses.

So it's [13.054:5.237] vs "surcharge.caveman.echo".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_degrees

[2] http://gis.stackexchange.com/a/8674

Unfortunately your ability to remember long strings of random numbers & letters is 30% at 8 & hits zero at around 10. Accurately remembering 4 words (they didn't test 3) is around 80%. Chart here: http://what3words.tumblr.com/post/102799066306/remembering-a...

Tl;dr DNS (human readble names) for physical locations on earths surface.

It's a nice idea "I will meet you at chair.lion.knowledge" is better than meet you at grid location 123.456.5676

But to be honest I know roughly where in London SW1 2EE is and the amount of times I will need that level of accuracy for an address in Mumbai or LA is quite limited. In addition "chair.lion.zebra" is actually less readable to billions of non Latin script natives around the world than numerical addresses.

Ah well - it's a nice idea.

It seems useful for unfamiliar locations and all the 3x3m locations without addresses, like where your tent is pitched or where on the trail you've fallen.

I'd rather (A) read out "chair.lion.knowledge" than (B) try to figure out the address of some little one-room shop in Guadalajara that's just an unmarked door on an unmarked corner and then hope the address-lookup round-trip resolves to the same place.

It works in many different languages, including many non-latin script languages.

I may have missed that part - but how? If say for example 甲骨文 represents my campsite, how on earth do I tell anyone as a non Chinese speaker. And if my campsite near Beijing is represented by English words how is that useful to the Chinese delivery driver? And if the two overlap what on earth is the point - we jus have lots of local or non local means of representing the Location - a Chinese local representation may as well be whatever they have now and I can keep to grid references for everything outside of London and the Home Counties. (It's uncivilised outside the borders I hear).

I would hypothesize that the vast majority of communication is between two speakers of the same language.

Some disclaimers since they at least used their normal nicknames. There are fresh accounts commenting super positively. They are:

gilesrhysjones, the Marketing Director at what3words

cjrsheldrick, the Co-founder of what3words

There are also http://locationawarenames.org/ and http://www.mapcode.com/ . I find them all really questionable as they try to push non-free, centralised setups.

No impropriety intended. Yes I work for what3words. Apologies for not disclaiming comments & replies.

Some interesting commentary on what3words in last weeks Spectator: http://www.spectator.co.uk/life/the-wiki-man/9348462/the-bes...

Do I also need a Google Maps license for my application? Looks like they're using their tiles.

Assuming everythig and everyone is having a GPS device its good. But in real world, anyone would understand that 1st cross 2nd main is near 2nd cross 2nd main but its impossible to know if lion.chocolate.news is near to bottle.key.bed or half way across the world.

Aah, crossings of numbered streets. You must be living in the US? Numbered streets are relatively rare in the world. I invite you to Google the street names in Amsterdam, capital of the Netherlands. That logic won't work there.

However, despite your not so well chosen example I do agree that this solution isn't my main view of the future. I think in a few years we will have Internet everywhere, even outside the boundaries of our country. I kind of have it, even when travelling (work or holidays). But I understand I'm still a minority. Once this happens we just WhatsApp, message, send our location via our mobile device. The other person clicks it and is navigated to your location.

Who needs (three) words?

Ha, I actually helped launch this site when it first went live with Cat2. From what I remember the codebase was pretty decent considering how well it performed on not much hardware.

I wonder what the motivation that a nearby location have a completely different name. It is hard to know if two places are close just by the name.

Context is being sacrificed for a very slick auto-correct system (in beta, going live v soon). When similar sounding 3 word combinations are shuffled around the world, it's pretty clear based on user location which result is the intended one. As a result, you can misspell pretty badly and the system will still handle it. Most exciting is that processing of voice input of 3 words is virtually 100% accurate using the same auto-correct algorithm - also coming v soon.

That's two "3 words" that are textually close to each other not two places which are spatially close.

"Two thirds of the world’s population is without a postal address,” Charles Prescott, Executive Director at the Global Address Data Association

50 or 60 countries have postal code or address databases which are kept reasonably current...’ ... ‘In the least developed countries, address verification may only mean that the city or town exists in that country.’- UNIVERSAL POSTAL UNION

“Over 50 percent of the world’s urban dwellers do not have access to named streets.” Catherine Farvacque-Vitkovic, World Bank

That's around 4 Billion people without an address.

The problem with this is that words always mean something. I don't want my house to be named fast.blazed.depravity

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