geohash: gcuvz30z w3w: drift.march.donor

I had to switch tabs 3 times to copy across the geohash since the page I found it on wouldnt let me copy and paste, I remembered the w3w immediately.

I am 100% against something like a global addressing standard being owned by a single company, however the amount of people ignoring w3w's extremely obvious utility and pointing to pluscodes, geohashing, grid references, geocoords etc is pretty tiring.

We have a standards body for emojis, cant we just agree on an open w3w implementation.

If you divide earth up into 4m x 4m cells using something like the S2 projection, you can uniquely address these using phrases of 3 words drawn from a database just under 32,000 words. The S2 projection ensures that the words in the higher levels of the hierarchy will change quite slowly. In most local contexts there will be only a single commonly repeated word. In a small number of more exceptional points there'd be just 2 or 3 unique values in use. So in practice you could use longer addresses and a smaller dictionary if you liked. This is probably a good idea for ergonomic reasons, as we can pick a set of words that are readily translated between languages, weed out any that are overly similar, etc.

I never uploaded the code anywhere, and it's on a laptop that died, but I busted out a toy version of the above in an afternoon a couple years ago just for fun. I used 4 word addresses and a database of about 2,500 of the most common english words.

W3W's entire value proposition is that they should earn a global rent off the use of addresses vs the above. It's absurd. And they intentionally avoid hierarchical organization of the addresses specifically to make it necessary to use their app/service to look crap up, which makes their service hilariously worse than the scheme described above.

With an S2 style hierarchy people will intuitively begin to recognize the common words in their living area at each level, and can use them in conversation without even consulting software. This is completely impossible with W3W's scheme.

The problem isn't figuring out a good scheme. Most of the people on this forum can manage that in a couple hours. The problem is the same with all other standardization efforts: getting a critical mass of people who give enough of a crap to use the standard.

This is an area where Google could ship something in maps and it'd have a decent chance of adoption outside of it. If you work on maps consider pitching a more ergonomic version of plus codes.

But in what situation is this useful? How is it more convenient or useful than a regular address? Even if you’re somewhere where there are no addresses, and you need to describe a location that has no other descriptive characteristics, isn’t it a lot easier to just drop a pin/bookmark on the map in your smartphone? Especially considering you can’t reasonably run the algorithm without a digital device of some kind.

Having the ability to turn your location into three words that will easily survive communication over a phone with dodge signal is very useful.

You could argue that that lat/lon or a street address should be fine. But memorising a two sequences of numbers, then repeating them accurately over a poor phone line is hard.

Street addresses are also hard, there’s frequently not a nearby road sign, or worse, the road name is ambiguous (your city may have multiple streets with the same name). Hell there’s no guarantee that the emergency services even have your street name in their database if it’s a new street, or it’s name was changed recently.

So basically any scenario where you need to transmit a location accurately between two parties who are operating two different mapping systems, and communicating over an unreliable comms link (phone, radio etc), is a good use case for W3W. W3W is like the phonetic alphabet for locations.

Personally I hate the fact the W3W are extracting rents from this services. But I can’t deny the utility of their service.

Not to mention that a 40000 word word list has a lot more room for misremembering and mishearing than spelling out a sequence of digits. If it had used a word list that was designed to be easily recognized by sound, had no plurals etc, that would have been a different thing.

Also, emergency services are local, but this system wastes bandwidth on being able to describe any location in the world.

Not only that, the word list is localised in different languages, and those are untranslatable as each locale uses a different coefficient table.

So aside from the fact that my address has around a 50/50 success rate with people trying to find it (My address is a building + street name that has a mirror building + street name across the other side of a motorway)

Transferring the address, the obvious example people give is emergency services but this applies to so many situations, I volunteer with a litter picking group and they have found w3w extremely useful to communicate locations, you "can" transfer a pin but you need those devices set up to do a transfer already, with w3w I can check the website for the location on my way out the door and enter it to my map on the way, people who arent setup as contacts can transfer it without having to trade phone numbers etc.

Its hard to understand how someone could not find a way to easily memorize and communicate a specific location a very useful thing?

In Japan, for e.g. there are no street numbers.

In the U.K. we have postal codes that generally refer to a street. But they sometimes can be only a portion of a street, sometimes they’re a building, sometimes they’re a large business who might be across multiple sites. At other times (usually rural) they’re very very long roads, so sticking the address into a Sat Nav takes you to that road but not the point on the road that you want to travel to. Because the system is so mixed, 99/100 nthe address is absolutely fine, but occasionally it isn’t. I agree dropping a pin is more useful though.

Ireland had no postal codes at all until recently.

Postal codes aren't addresses in most places; they're an overlay system on top of addresses to make it easier for the post office to route mail. They're great! And there's absolutely no reason why a country should pay eternal rent to What3Words to use their proprietary code system when they can develop their own.

On the phone? There's a bit I don't like about W3W, but efficiency of communication is their killer feature.

They don't want that to happen, at least not an open source implementation. They want to be in the position of Pantone and colour.

Both services mimic the principle of URL shortener applied to geographic location. (Even if, as you point out, one is public domain machine readable and the other is proprietary human readable one).

But why are url shortener so popular in the first place? Why are they perfectly usable even if competing services exits? (and I'd bet most popular are self-generated like youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ).

I think they are popular mainly because they rely on the ubiquitous HTTP protocol to be fully interoperable with almost any HTTP client.

There is no such universal protocol or library to manage geospatial data provided in "custom hashed format". But all of the various tools available will gladly accept a latitude/longitude XY coordinate pair because they are perfectly machine readable and while not human friendly they actually mean something so that professionals can make sense of the numbers if needed. Also as far as variable precision is needed, let's throw a round(,) function and be set with it.

So as of now both solution are essentially some kind of private API with no widely available and stadardised support to revert to a usable latitude/longitude. So I would guess many GIS power users look at this suspiciously secretly hoping that no one will ever share such obfuscated data format to them for any critical use.

NB : For more complex data representations there is a whole standard defining organisation https://www.ogc.org that define horribly complex (yet useful) data structures and gladly make the standard freely and publicly available. Maybe they could enforce a flavor of geohash into a FOSS standard so that tooling could refer to it, but I'm not sure it's on their roadmap.

This is not theoretical; back in 2017 they were bragging at how they'd convinced the nations of Kiribati, Mongolia, Sint-Maarten, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Tonga, Nigeria and the Solomon Islands to use them as a national standard. I'm certain that the actual usage is exaggerated on their part but imagine if it were really true. Addressing is far too important to be held by a proprietary company. Addressing is a national service that countries should provide as part of being a nation, and there's a long history of countries developing addressing systems that does not rely on some predatory intellectual property system.

5% of my annoyance is What3Words pretends like they invented some brilliant new idea that's unique and should be IP protected. No, the idea is older than them. And the implementation is obvious to anyone with ordinary skill in the art of addressing. Anyone competent with GIS concepts can design a similar system in a few days' work. And there are many better alternatives.

The other 10% of my complaint is their static addressing model. It's not good that two houses nearby have completely different addresses; real addressing always has hierarchical names and there's a reason for that. There's also a problem using words in that they are localized to the country's language. That's better than forcing English everywhere but makes interoperability way more confusing. Finally there's all the problems people keep finding with their word lists; that's covered well by other writers so I won't go into it.

PS: I misspoke when I said Geohash is the oldest similar system. MGRS dates to the 1940s. There may be older ones, too.

This couples with the technological issues outlined in the article above. I believe the vitriol against W3W is fueled by the combination of rent-seeking behavior on a standard of poor technical quality.

I’m also bothered that one of the main use cases W3W’s marketing highlights is for specifying locations in emergencies, a totally non-commercial/public-good application. W3W presents itself convincingly to laymen as this sort of public-good open standard, but they’re just another startup with a proprietary product they’re hoping to monopolize.

It's a great idea, a mediocre implementation, and a set of business practices that make the antichrist jealous.

On top of that, their bloodthirsty pursuit of any criticism means that legitimate discussions of the system's flaws can't happen in the open. The lack of that criticism may have encouraged some services to adopt W3W without realizing its flaws, and there's already some hinting that such a flaw may have already interfered with actual rescue operations:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56901363

Thankfully the rescue was able to proceed once they switched to another coordinate system, and that case didn't result in a fatality. How many other such cases are there? We might never know. The company may have literal blood on its hands at this point, but fixing the flaws would require discussing them first, which we can't do as long as they're empowered to shut down discourse.

and here[3] is a long article of why w3w isn't safe for the use-cases they're peddling.

tl;dr: they're a garbage company, with a garbage product, run by ghouls.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/30/what3words-legal-threat-wh...

[2] https://twitter.com/AaronToponce/status/1387933438305394690

[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what3words-confusion-suitable...

Another solution would be a smaller set of easier words, on subgrids like geohash, because gradual precision is really better.

I suppose the emoji version survives because it doesn't infringe on their word list or patent, which specifically is for "words"

What's the spatial resolution of that? Seems to be dozens of meters at best.

Both of these endpoints (and everything in between) are [telephone][megaphone][currency-exchange]. https://i.imgur.com/TzUU1cG.png https://i.imgur.com/5iTtm6c.png

Not a resilient solution.