11–20 of 26 posts
Although it will be interesting to see how they can make money out of it given it is a closed model and how that conflicts with bringing its benefits to poor communities.
What3words is a proprietary licensed database that should be public/free.
It'd have been nice if W3W was the product of a foundation like Mozilla, but it's not. There's no reason to begrudge the founders wanting to turn it in to a business.
The problem with this approach is of course language limitations. Can we bypass this with a combination of numbers and universal symbols?
But I like your idea of a mapping system based on emoji :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note the simple words are assigned to populated areas. In the ocean it might give you "overripe.thoroughbreds.salads".
In French, on their map demo which centers the map in Paris, it's already pretty bad. I honestly have no idea what some of the words mean. Edit: A few examples taken randomly of mostly unused words in French (require a dictionary for a good 90% of native speakers): Volute, redise, dépiler, rapière, ânier, putatif, toison. All of that is in the center of Paris, and it took me 5 mins to find them, there's probably hund…
Do you need to? If you don't speak the appropriate language you won't know the meaning of the words for any place. That doesn't make it any less useful so long as you can pronounce them.
The problem with this approach is of course language limitations. Can we bypass this with a combination of numbers and universal symbols?
I'm not a huge fan of their service for copyright reasons, they don't publish a database of the words ( https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207769875 ) and the whole thing is copyrighted so you can't reuse it. It makes it pretty much useless as an universal address system for this reason. Also on the downsides, I don't know for other languages but in French the words are NOT common words and a good half…
The words in different languages also aren't translations, they are completely different, which adds a layer of confusion. I really don't see this going anywhere.
I'm not a huge fan of their service for copyright reasons, they don't publish a database of the words ( https://support.what3words.com/hc/en-us/articles/207769875 ) and the whole thing is copyrighted so you can't reuse it. It makes it pretty much useless as an universal address system for this reason. Also on the downsides, I don't know for other languages but in French the words are NOT common words and a good half…
Moreover it is absolutely not locality sensitive, rendering the whole system into a proprietary hashing algorithm. Probably the localization is pretty much the only element I agree to be good to have, but I believe it's likely that some word pairs are in the same synset for some languages, even though I'm not really in a position to evaluate its wordlists.
The center of Vienna is "decays.jump.graver" (if those are simple words is questionable).
But when I switch to German the same block becomes "fahrende.hügeligen.ansprüche" (driving, hilly, demands). So the words I get by default are again just random strings for someone who doesn't speak German)
And even someone who speaks German may get the inflection of the words wrong and end up in "fahren.hügelig.ansprüche", "fahrend.hügelige.ansprüche" or any other permutation of the many ways the same word could be written in another context.
And worst of all, all those permutations exist and map to other locations somewhere on earth.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In French, on their map demo which centers the map in Paris, it's already pretty bad. I honestly have no idea what some of the words mean. Edit: A few examples taken randomly of mostly unused words in French (require a dictionary for a good 90% of native speakers): Volute, redise, dépiler, rapière, ânier, putatif, toison. All of that is in the center of Paris, and it took me 5 mins to find them, there's probably hund…
I honestly have no idea what some of the words mean. Do you need to? If you don't speak the appropriate language you won't know the meaning of the words for any place. That doesn't make it any less useful so long as you can pronounce them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In French, on their map demo which centers the map in Paris, it's already pretty bad. I honestly have no idea what some of the words mean. Edit: A few examples taken randomly of mostly unused words in French (require a dictionary for a good 90% of native speakers): Volute, redise, dépiler, rapière, ânier, putatif, toison. All of that is in the center of Paris, and it took me 5 mins to find them, there's probably hund…
I honestly have no idea what some of the words mean. Do you need to? If you don't speak the appropriate language you won't know the meaning of the words for any place. That doesn't make it any less useful so long as you can pronounce them.
The problem with this approach is of course language limitations. Can we bypass this with a combination of numbers and universal symbols?
Numbers are not universal. In that 8 can be represented as Ⅷ, ב, ၇, 八 etc. But I like your idea of a mapping system based on emoji :-)