Giving Everyone in the World an Address

I may be missing something here, but it seems like this solves only half of the problem. Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names, but in order to actually deliver something you need to be able to navigate to it.

The advantage of a (building number, street name, locality) address is that it identifies some point on the edge of a graph, and that the edges and vertices are well-known.

I'll grant that within any locality, people generally know how to get from point A to point B (and frequently don't know the names of the streets), but it seems like what you really need is a way to map the unique 3m squares onto that knowledge.

Even with that problem solved, another problem comes up with planning deliveries efficiently. There's no information embedded in the what3words address that encodes any notion of adjacency or relative distance. I realize that this is probably intentional to reduce the likelihood of errors in addresses going unnoticed, but it means determining nearness requires access to the whole mapping data set (or at least enough to determine that a what3words address isn't in the set of ones you care about).

First sentences of the article:

"Where the streets have no name," sang rock frontman Bono on one of U2's biggest hits. "It must be hell being a postman, then," came the sarcastic rejoinder from the music press.

But the system they come up with is still hell for a postman. He either remembers the 111111 three-word combinations for his square kilometer of delivery, or he can't work without an electronic device.

I see the problem, but hope that there are better solutions. Especially ones that are free: A non-free address system is absurd in my opinion, to put it mildly.

I recently learned that Northern Canada has this problem.

Most of the communities in the Arctic do not have street names. Canada Post has been forcing them in the last few years to start, so, for example, a community called Aklavik officially has one street, Aklv St. Even though there are physically more streets than that, and streets at right angles, they're all called Aklv St.

I work for the telco that services these communities, and it's hilarious to look at the street addresses in our plant and provisioning systems - addresses are literally "brown bld across from red bld", "House near lake" etc.

Not surprisingly, I'm having trouble writing code to parse street addresses :)

Usual disclaimer for what3words: neat idea, shame the data/algorithm is closed.

In the Rio example, a postal service or courier would have to pay w3w to license the words->lat/lon lookup before they could deliver anything.

I have to think "ugh" when I read about this idea. Random three words to every square seems like chaos to me.

These also take a lot of bytes to store. In the US, every address or "delivery point" can be represented by 11 numerals: zip+4+2. If you read the barcodes on your received US mail, you will see the normally invisible +2. (zip+4 is usually granular to one side of a block or MDU mailbox cluster, and the extra two numerals represent a unique mailbox within the zip+4.)

Amateur radio people have organized the world into grid squares, which are a bit larger as they are minutes of latitude/longitude in either dimension. However they are like postcodes, in that once you are familiar with the system you can glance at one and have a rough idea of whether it is near you or not, and where on the map it is. For instance, the White House in Washington is within grid square FM18lv.

Introduction to the grid square system at [1] and a rudimentary mapping tool at [2].

I'm not sure if there is any reason why the grid squares couldn't be further subdivided. Even then, this wouldn't solve the problem in some places I've been: The barrios around Caracas are not only tightly packed in two dimensions, but they have been building their homes on top of each other, so a 3m x 3m square could very well contain five homes or more.

[1]: http://www.arrl.org/grid-squares [2]: http://www.qrz.com/gridmapper

I still prefer Geohash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

It's already implemented in mongo, elastic, solr, etc, supports arbitrary length/precision codes, adjacent cells have similar hashes. http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/geohash.html http://mapzen.github.io/leaflet-spatial-prefix-tree/

Nice idea but there is also sacrifice of the relativity of the places. Based on the calculations, looks like the order of the words are important too.

"With 40,000 dictionary words, you have 64 trillion combinations, and there are 57 trillion squares."

If the dictionary words can be doubled, the order of the words can be made unimportant too. That way it would have ~80 Trillion combinations (64 Trillion/3!) * 2^3.

Discussion of the company's own website from three months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198

One critical issue in this (apart from the proprietary approach) might be the mapping of adresses between languages, since a random Indian or Chinese person will probably not benefit from English words.

Can you identify subsets consisting of 10,000s of words in different languages that have one-to-one maps to any other global language subset for w3w? (i.e. without multiple words being suitable for a translation of the word)

> Sure it's helpful to cover the earth in 3m squares with unique names ...

I'm actually not convinced. Squares don't tessellate a sphere; you have singularities at the poles. Sure, there aren't many people living there, but it's important to think about the limitations of this approach.

If you think this is really just an edge case, remember that projecting a square onto a sphere necessitates some distortion. You can choose to distort angles or distances, but you have to choose one. For distances, well, a "3m x 3m" square becomes essentially meaningless. The problem gets worse when you increase latitude. Canada, northern Europe and Russia are especially prone to this problem. The same argument applies to locations in the Southern hemisphere as well.

discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198 earlier

How about retrofitting DNS to do this? Encode a persons GPS coordinates in a TXT record. Now instead of writing my address on an envelope, I write me.example.com. The mailman/post office can then look up someone's coordinates via a DNS query. The benefit of this is that when I move, I can simply update my DNS entry. I could either host my own address or 3rd party could. Local government could grid up their own regions and assign address to fixed locations. You could choose to CNAME your address to the government allocated address or use the government issued one for the plot.

This article is clearly placed by the guy featured in it whose company is promoting an alternative to street addresses.

The article incorrectly states that people without street addresses have no postman and can not get mail.

This is not the case at all. I've lived in many places throughout the world without street addresses. Mail is delivered to addresses consisting of the person's name and things such as their village, precinct or neighborhood.

The articles assumption and promotion of non-factual claims as true suggests the author and the company simply do not know what they are talking about.

I lived in Saipan for a few months, part of the CNMI. A couple decades ago they attempted assigning road names and addresses, but what you find is that almost no one uses them. They don't have a postal delivery infrastructure, so those who can afford it get private company PO Boxes (the official PO boxes are extremely limited).

To me it seems like the real challenge is funding and setting up a postal infrastructure. Creating 'addresses' of any scheme would emerge organically out of necessity from that.

This seems as behind-the-curve as printing out email and delivering it to physical mailboxes. As long as you can accept delivery of electronic documents, nobody should care where you "reside." If you need to take delivery of goods, you can specify a designee for that purpose, as and where needed.

An imprecise, centralized, English-centric system for labeling the planet. Why not just use GPS coordinates? It's much more universal, distributed and precise.

"Interestingly, he says what3words has not had to market itself intensively"

Really? Don't they have connections with Ogilvy and Mather?

Coming from a country with a working, comprehensive, addressing system, I never understood how special this was until I started extensively traveling. It's kind of mind-boggling how unique of an invention addresses are and yet how simple they are.

It requires only two things

- give an identifier to each road, numbers are perfectly fine (the scheme isn't even all that important)

- each property plot along a given road gets an incrementing number, plots with multiple housing units are given some kind of subdivider (Apartment, Unit, etc.). This works best with oddly numbered properties on one side and evenly numbered properties on the other.

So long as you use unique identifiers, you don't even need states, counties, zip codes or other administrative districts -- though this makes things easier -- all you need to know if the block of property numbers the address lives in.

An alternate approach is to simply subdivide a territory into smaller and smaller zones until you get to a small enough spot on the planet that you've uniquely identified a plot of land or a building or whatever. I believe Korean addresses used to use something like this but are slowly moving on to a mixed mode system like the U.S. uses (subdivide areas, then use street names and numbers).

It's also seems absolutely insane that the concept of an address, or parts of an address can be some kind of Intellectual Property that a company holds some kind of right to. My understanding is that this used to be a significant problem with addressing in the U.K. and remains one in Ireland. The last time I visited Ireland, outside of the cities, addresses were give to us as Lat,Long coordinates! Absolute insanity.

I remember trying to send a package to a friend in rural England once, the address was something like "The Yellow Home behind the Red Barn, Essex, U.K.". It took 8 weeks to arrive, I have no idea how much of that was spent by the Royal Mail matching color swatches and building combinations.

It's an interesting notion that we couple postal service to addresses. In some places, like Dubai, they are decoupled and the post only makes its way to a P.O. Box, not to a residence -- which of course have no address, and end up with descriptions like "Building ABC Behind the Market, off of the Second Exit, 2 Lefts and a Right after entry" which is necessary for non-government postal services like Fedex. Oddly, this system makes a kind of sense in the Internet age, unless you actually have to get somewhere.

In some countries, local landmarks and these sorts of quasi-turn-by-turn directions-as-addresses are the norm. Oddly, they often persist long after what they describe is gone. "The Red House behind the Temple" might be somebody's address, but the Temple fell during an Earthquake 20 years before and the house is no longer Red. The claim is that the local postman has enough local knowledge to make this work, but there's so many obvious failure modes to make this sort of "system" seem absurd.

If you look back long enough, the U.S. didn't always have a useful system. Old Revolutionary War era advertisements look like the kinds of semi-useless addresses you see elsewhere. Addresses definitely appears to be product of cities, but it's useful when it's used on a national scheme. It's so simple and so absurdly effective, it's always seemed bizarre to me that it's just not universal.

This proposal is interesting, but ultimately a bad idea. Correct addressing encodes both a unique location and navigation way points.

Take a U.S. address:

1234 Main St. Beverly Hills, CA 90210

Beverly Hills, CA is honestly not necessary, but does make it human readable, 90210 tells you this location is out west and the post office has a map that subdivides it even more to a specific delivery zone.

There's hopefully only one Main St. in that zip code, and the building is on the 1200 block of that street on the even side. When you arrive there, it should have "1234" on the building and the street signs should tell you that you are on the correct street.

A better proposal is perhaps to use a subdividing system. The world is split into N "squares" and each of those is split into N "squares" and each of those into N and so on until you're at a fine resolution. A simple map lookup for "Fred-Berry-Fred-Cow" would get you to within a few meters of wherever. The military uses versions of such a system (MGRS, UTM, etc.) and without electronic aids you can pretty quickly find pretty much any place on the planet within a few moments.

http://www.earlyamerica.com/pages-past/ben-franklins-pennsyl...