Yay my address, when translated from French, is something like "throat.shame.cutting". I'm eager to share it with friends!
What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m
11–20 of 61 posts
Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m
#12Great, my house is borderline inappropriate. Before seeing that, I thought this was a neat idea.
Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m
#13Clever, but not very practical. Addressing and city/state/country names are very well ingrained into our culture and have real-world meaning. We can understand the general location of an address just by reading it. w3w takes all context out of location names, and forces you to map it with a tool. I don't see how that will improve anything.
As you can purchase a one word name for a specific location, this really just looks to me like someone trying to quickly make a buck with a clever idea, similar to the "milion dollar homepage".
If they did have a more meaningful intent, it is not communicated well enough for me to have received the message.
Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m
#14I wonder what the motivation that a nearby location have a completely different name. It is hard to know if two places are close just by the name.
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.
Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m
#15Why even allow similar sounding words? Lamp and lamps? I thought the whole point was to avoid ambiguity. I wonder where there corpus of words comes from..?
Well, they need about 38500 words, so it seems possible to do without having to use both "lamp" and "lamps", but it's probably not possible to avoid every pair of similar seeming words, eg "principle" and "principal".
All homophones are removed (where/wear, principle/principal) so that the system always works when people communicate a 3 word location by voice.
Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m
#16The biggest problem I see with these global addressing schemes is that they have nothing to do with the location, and they dont have any locality. Snake.Dog.Rabbit is in a location with no snakes, dogs or rabbits and is right next to Lamp.Chair.Guitar? Theres no visible logic to it. its just easier to say 123 River Road. By the name you know its likely to be near a river, and it will be right next to 124 River Road
Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m
#17Tl;dr DNS (human readble names) for physical locations on earths surface.
It's a nice idea "I will meet you at chair.lion.knowledge" is better than meet you at grid location 123.456.5676
But to be honest I know roughly where in London SW1 2EE is and the amount of times I will need that level of accuracy for an address in Mumbai or LA is quite limited. In addition "chair.lion.zebra" is actually less readable to billions of non Latin script natives around the world than numerical addresses.
Ah well - it's a nice idea.
Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m
#18This is stupid on so many levels. What about floors? 3m x 3m in a skyscraper can be an address of thousands of people. And why even allow the oceans?
Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m
#19This is only tangentially related in that it's not using ordinary words. But GeoHash always struck me as a clever encoding for lat/lon pairs. Locations look like "u4pruydqqvj", so gibberish, but concise. The neat thing is geohash is a progressive encoding so you can lop off characters from the right and still be naming the same area, just less precisely. Ie while u4pruydqqvj is a specific point in Denmark u4pru is just sort of in the area of Denmark. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash
Re: What3Words: a giant grid of the world made up of 57 trillion squares of 3m x 3m
#20Funny, they have a perfectly translated Dutch version they serve to me, it looks like a lot of effort and time has been put into this project.
Yeah, also a bit useless. I don't think many Dutch people exist that can't read English, or even that don't enjoy reading English. Those that don't most likely don't browse the web much either.