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Funny, 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.
Poor form.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're commenting from the perspective of someone who comes from a culture with addresses. Most of the world doesn't have addresses. Try to go to a meeting in India. It typically involves three or four phone calls to find the place.
You really think most people live at locations without addressing systems? How can we even prove that? The only locations I'm aware of that that is true are: very poor parts of Asia, Africa, India, and maybe some of the favelas of Brazil. With essentially all of North America, South America, Europe, and much of China, along with all of Japan, Australia, being covered by an addressing system. I'd wager 2/3 of all peop…
50 or 60 countries have postal code or address databases which are kept reasonably current...’ ... ‘In the least developed countries, [address verification] may only mean that the city or town exists in that country.’- UNIVERSAL POSTAL UNION
“Over 50 percent of the world’s urban dwellers do not have access to named streets.” Catherine Farvacque-Vitkovic, World Bank
That's around 4 Billion people without an address.
50 or 60 countries have postal code or address databases which are kept reasonably current...’ ... ‘In the least developed countries, address verification may only mean that the city or town exists in that country.’- UNIVERSAL POSTAL UNION
“Over 50 percent of the world’s urban dwellers do not have access to named streets.” Catherine Farvacque-Vitkovic, World Bank
That's around 4 Billion people without an address.
Similar precision can be achieved by using GPS coordinates with four (10 m accuracy) to five (1 m) decimal digits, sometimes even fewer depending on location as you don't need trailing zeroes. The coordinate system is old, ubiquitous, and it's readability is similar to that of ipv4 addresses. So it's [13.054:5.237] vs "surcharge.caveman.echo". [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_degrees [2] http://gis.stackexcha…
gilesrhysjones, the Marketing Director at what3words
cjrsheldrick, the Co-founder of what3words
There are also http://locationawarenames.org/ and http://www.mapcode.com/ . I find them all really questionable as they try to push non-free, centralised setups.
Let's look at more singular/plural combinations.
http://what3words.com/tables.chair.lamp is close to Minneapolis
http://what3words.com/table.chairs.lamp pretty close to http://what3words.com/tables.chairs.lamp are on the east coast of the USA.
West coast: http://what3words.com/tables.chairs.lamps is close to http://what3words.com/table.chair.lamps, both are on the opposite side of the continent to http://what3words.com/table.chairs.lamps which is pretty close to http://what3words.com/tables.chair.lamps
Very confusing!
Their condusion-avoidance example is table-chair-lamp vs. table-chair-lamps. Let's look at more singular/plural combinations. http://what3words.com/tables.chair.lamp is close to Minneapolis http://what3words.com/table.chairs.lamp pretty close to http://what3words.com/tables.chairs.lamp are on the east coast of the USA. West coast: http://what3words.com/tables.chairs.lamps is close to http://what3words.com/table.chair…
west coast table.chairs.lamps - 194 miles - tables.chair.lamps
east coast tables.chairs.lamps - 340 miles - table.chair.lamps
Disclaimer - I work for what3words
This 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?
Some disclaimers since they at least used their normal nicknames. There are fresh accounts commenting super positively. They are: gilesrhysjones, the Marketing Director at what3words cjrsheldrick, the Co-founder of what3words There are also http://locationawarenames.org/ and http://www.mapcode.com/ . I find them all really questionable as they try to push non-free, centralised setups.
Tl;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 billio…
It works in many different languages, including many non-latin script languages.