Location app divides world into 3m² squares and gives them all names

boing
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What Three Words has been around for years, as others have said. It’s always seemed pretty useless to me, although I can imagine a few use cases, like disaster response or delivery in crowded areas that lack formalized addressing.

The random-seeming word combinations give nothing away as to context, though. Two adjacent squares will have completely different 3-word codes. So you still have to use an app or translator to get back to lat/lon or street address.

Google’s Plus codes are a similar attempt at a universal location system, and make much more sense since you can use as much precision as needed.

ETA It appears I owe several people cokes, including @spiregrain, @SSH, and others.

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Since there’s another almost identically worded article since this one, I think it is

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Exactly. I’m not a fan of them locking a function that maps between coordinates and a wordlist behind an API.

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Right, and the complete arbitrariness of the words is unhelpful.

For example, my front door in Columbia, MO, USA is ///knots.diversions.objection *

///diversions.knots.objection is near Shelton, Washington state.

///knots.objection.diversions is in the wilderness of western Alaska.

Also note that all the words are English.

* not actually my front door

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You can send location using text through Google Maps and Apple Maps. It’s much more likely that people will have these apps over W3W.

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It’s not that useful for that since people need to have a proprietary app (already installed) or access to the internet.

Many apps (that people are much more likely to have) can send your location via text.

“Pluscodes” serve a similar purpose and they are simple to generate.

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We had coordinated in advance to have the app. We had tried sending locations through Google Maps, but had problems.

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Yes, I went on to make that very point.

That one, too

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Two articles on JTW up on BoingBoing at the same time? What has triggered this?

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About that…

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Oh, sorry, I misunderstood. I took out your front door and delivered it to ///knots.diversions.objection. So, if you are looking for it, there it is.

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I second all the reasons this has been a terrible idea.

As a disaster response professional in a previous life Open Location Codes are much better and scalable, the H3 system is quite good as well, both opensource and work off line.

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Why are you recommending a proprietary system with numerous well documented flaws run by an aggressively litigious company?

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I had not realized that before. So it is not just “what three words” but really “what three words in a specific order” to find a spot. That’s certainly not as catchy.

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I have an objection to your knotty diversion of my door.

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Words can be easy to mishear. I wish there was a purely numeric way to do this type of geo-location. And maybe we could omit the third segment, since coding for a position on an (ostensibly) planar surface only requires 2 coordinates. And it would be super cool if you could use subsets of the numbers for varying precision.

Man, if only there was a system like this to use. :thinking:

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But if you’re in Switzerland, and you need to call 1414 for helicopter rescue, do it from INSIDE the Rega app, which will post your geo location via a separate channel so they get it with your phone call at the call center.

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People suck conveying long strings of numbers. For computer to computer? Sure. If a human is the loop, not really.

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At some point w3w was selling the ability to change the words for a square in their database, so maybe Disney did that.

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