Unique 3-word identifiers for every 3 meter square on Earth

by gitinit • 3 years ago

9 20 3 years ago

habibur• 3 years ago

A gov agency or a known non-profit org coming up with it would have been better.

sakjur2• 3 years ago

What3Words is an interesting idea, but the lack of locality and propriety nature of the codes makes me doubtful of using it for anything important.

I prefer the pluscodes introduced by Google as it is open source, useful offline, conveys locality between codes, and doesn’t hinge on the use of English.

https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/

kybernetikos4• 3 years ago

I made something similar that has locality https://wherewords.id but that sometimes gets criticised. Some people believe that not having close positions be similar makes it less likely to make mistakes. Personally I'm skeptical about this, but it's certainly an argument that gets made.

sakjur2• 3 years ago

I’ve heard that argument. I’m also skeptical about its weight compared to the benefits of locality. When what3words says it, I feel like it’s a salespitch as to why we should use their proprietary solution.

I think your checkmoji solves that problem in its entirety more elegantly. Would a fifth word make it error correcting rather than error detecting?

Daviey• 3 years ago

Rather than long/lat, I love the concept of using Zooko’s triangle for a geospatial problem, such as:

  - human meaningful
  - decentralized
  - secure

However, w3w's isn't that. It is a centralized system which is actively enforced and it isn't secure.

There is actually quite a lot of critics of w3w, such as: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...

vincnetas• 3 years ago

Is What3Words a for profit company? Is it a good idea to base solutions on it? What value does this company brings in long run?

ivegotnoaccount• 3 years ago

Not sure I want to use what seems like a fully-closed standard for something as frequent as sharing locations when open alternatives exist.

jsnell• 3 years ago

What3Words has been discussed dozens of times on HN, but the most relevant one is probably this analysis of the algorithm and the properties of the generated codes, as well as its companion piece:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27015046

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271

austinjp• 3 years ago

This company/app pops up on HN with some regularity, and attracts a fair amount of criticism:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359256

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27350975

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27058271

It's business practices seem distasteful, several legal threats against competitors and critics, heavy covert "submarine" advertising (i.e. ads masquerading as news), and apparently unexplained popularity among policy-makers despite criticism from those on the front line (e.g. emergency services). Technical criticism centres on the fact that it's algorithm is not as good as it could be, hence risking lives, and is not open. Several alternatives exist, some of which the creators claim address these technical issues:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20970664

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31829267

I've no horse in this race, but frankly what3words seems a bad choice and an unpleasant organisation.

Edit to add links to reported issues and legal actions:

https://archive.is/6KVvL

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

http://web.archive.org/web/20210430005537/https://twitter.co...

aeurielesn• 3 years ago

I dislike my location forms a phrase with a negative connotation.

dllthomas• 3 years ago

Have you considered moving?

thinkingemote2• 3 years ago

one of the features is that the spot a couple of metres away will have an entirely different set of words

kybernetikos4• 3 years ago

When I made a location to word system I ended up having to spend a huge amount of time on the word list to try to remove words that tend to combine negatively. Partly because of that (but also because I went slightly more accurate than w3w and with a hierarchical encoding) I needed 4 words per location.

Still, I think it's a nearly impossible task.

gkbrk• 3 years ago

I have an old and unfinished article [1] that uses geohash / quadtiles to implement the same thing.

If your goal isn't "every location on Earth", you have a smaller bounding box (like a country or "all of Europe") and this will result in the squares being more precise, or the identifiers or word lists being shorter. Could be worth the trade-off depending on the requirements.

[1] https://www.gkbrk.com/wiki/Quadtiles-full/#encoding-coordina...

Euphorbium• 3 years ago

I wish this was more popular, with huge buildings addresses are not enough to deliver packages.

thinkingemote2• 3 years ago

"Our opinion is that the proprietary W3W serivce is unhelpful and dangerous."

https://w3w.me.ss/ What 3 Words is a Mess

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Personally I think the *idea* is great and is actually useful but the closed and internet only nature of this service is troubling and the behaviour of the company doesn't seem that positive. There are better solutions which run with the same idea. This company is VC backed and is using (it seems to me) all of their funding for marketing.

The better solutions don't have vc backing and no millions to spend on marketing.

cheradenine_uk• 3 years ago

Ah, the investor cash incinerator that is what3words!

gitinit• 3 years ago

Didn’t realize the history of the company prior, apologies.

Unique 3-word identifiers for every 3 meter square on Earth

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