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Why Bother with What Three Words?

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#121

Post by aembleton »

Anderkent wrote: post #92
nuklearwanze wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that's exactly what they are after: funny (or otherwise "engaging") three word combinations that are: (a) easy to remember, and (b) promote their service. - the default square when looking up the town i live in is leber.abhilfe.schnell (german), translated "liver, relief, quick", so maybe that's what their algorithm is optimized for? Either way, the whole system seems pretty stupid: why 3x3m (way to high res…

>location data is usually not shared verbally but sent via some kind of text medium - you just send GPS-coordinates from another (map-)app directly through your email/messaging-app. seems simple enough. So in one setting I have to email myself a link to get the map on another device. In the other I just type three words from one screen into my phone. I wonder which one's more convenient.

you could scan a QR code from your phone

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#122

Post by yorwba »

mchannon wrote: post #76
darkstar999 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it account for geological drifting? This is probably the most important social issue with these kind of systems.

Not OOTB, but I would imagine that any geocoding system could include a suffix, like "(1987)", to know which dataset to use, so as long as there was a server providing accurate geocoding for a particular point in time. This is a service-related question, though, not a method-related question. There's no math equation that'll tell you your house is there when it used to be here.

The formula might not be elegant, but if you have an exact description of tectonic drift, you can absolutely have a code that refers to a fixed location on its plate, rather than to a point on some imaginary sphere.

GPS coordinates are just one possible solution, there's no reason to consider equivalent encodings of the same values as the only alternatives.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#125

Post by dexterdog »

mchannon wrote: post #53

W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before figuring out if you can afford their service. I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W: •Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on e…

Of course it has "call for price." Look at their team page. There are over 100 people listed. That is absolutely insane for a product of this simplicity. The VCs are clearly making them burn through cash as fast as possible so they can own everything.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#126

Post by carbine »

mchannon wrote: post #53

W3W suffers horribly from "call for price". You won't catch Google or Amazon making you call and talk to a human being (on GMT time no less) before figuring out if you can afford their service. I'm preparing my own version, truly open source (though with a premium component), with the following improvements over W3W: •Length-optimized. If one character sufficiently describes your location, you don't need to tack on e…

this is way off topic but try buying Google Marketing Cloud services. you have to fill out a 'talk to sales' form, no one ever calls you back, and if you call/chat with any other type of support they have zero idea who to connect you to.

Google is not exempt from this type of behavior, unfortunately.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#127

Post by bradstewart »

maxerickson wrote: post #103
saalweachter wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Being able to naively navigate city -> street -> number is incredibly useful, and that it is occasionally broken doesn't make it an undesirable feature.

It's more than occasionally broken, there's billions of people living in spots where it doesn't work.

Billions? You've found navigation by street number to be unreliable in 20+ % of locations?

Either way, it does work for several billion other people.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#128

Post by jvanderbot »

velcrovan wrote: post #7

There is another big problem with W3W that Terence doesn’t mention: it isn’t scalar. From another W3W-criticism blog post ( https://mwfrost.com/space-is-scalar.html ): “An addressing system is successful insofar as it enables us to execute the suite of cognitive tasks that constitute navigation. Associating a destination with its location on the earth is only one of these chores. “If you have a powerful computer in y…

This is my main complaint I can intuitively know, using rules of thumb, if a lat lon is within 100 miles, on this hemisphere, etc.

Is "angry ape alligator" right next door or in Europe? No idea. Which fire station do we relay a call to? I don't know, let's ask w3w servers (during an emergency ... )

To the precision that I want to get someone to help me when I'm trapped in a car, you really only need a few significant digits of lat/lon (.YYYY/.ZZZZ) will get you to within 1 km most of the time. The left-of-decimal numbers are not needed if you are calling local 911, as an increment there shifts by a hundred km.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#129

Post by DoreenMichele »

aembleton wrote: post #111
ajuc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The emojis one have the nice property that close addresses share some words.

And the emoji one will work across languages.

Has anyone else tried to look up a location, find the emoji(s) for it and then put the text for it back into the search bar? It seems to not do reverse lookup, making it completely useless as far as I can tell. You can find the emoji(s) for a place, but not a place that corresponds to the emojis.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#130

Post by rodw »

W3W feels a lot like Swatch .beats [1]. It's not exactly solving a problem the doesn't exist, but I think solution is at least as bad as the problem we started with.

At least .beats had the excuse of being a marketing gimmick, or so I assume. No one really thought millidays-since-midnight-GMT was a reasonable alternative to time-zones or just UTC time, right?

What is the problem that W3W is intended to solve? The idea is that I'll describe a location via W3W coordinates rather than by address (or lat/lon)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

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