cjrsheldrick

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.

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.

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

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.

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.