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Why Bother with What Three Words?

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Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#181

Post by ehsankia »

ghayes wrote: post #178
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…

I thought this was a wink and a nod to just using standard latitude/longitude. Doesn't lat/long naturally solve each of your bullet points? •Length-optimized. More digits = more precision, check. •Precision optimized. Except for adding zeros, check. •Precision-focused. Sig figs cover this. •Logic-optimized. Adding or subtracting to lat or long respectively. •Spheroid-optimized. I believe this applies to latitude and…

They do speak of characters, which then starts to just sound like https://plus.codes

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#183

Post by NikkiA »

mirimir wrote: post #108
maxerickson wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it seemed you were arguing those two numbers could easily be encoded using existing words. If you want to make gibberish word like objects it's probably possible.

But what's the point of that? If they were always the same two (or three) words, fine. But if there are multiple such encoding systems, any set of three words (foo.bar.baz) is ambiguous. Because it depends on the system being used. So sure, someone might remember "foo.bar.baz". But "foo.bar.baz" in W3W might be in SF. But in Hanoi by some other system. And then we get to the need to pay W3W to generate those codes. T…

TBF The maidenhead system (which is a worldwide standard) IS, IMO fairly easy to remember.

And because it's pairs are increasing in area, I can state that I live in IO93 and it narrows it to:

https://www.karhukoti.com/maidenhead-grid-square-locator/?gr...

or I could give the next 2 characters to narrow it to a 1km x 1km (roughly) area that covers my town, or the 2 letters and 2 numbers that give a small area that pinpoints 2-3 houses on my street.

It's not really any more complex or hard to remember than a standard postal code or zip code.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#184

Post by DoreenMichele »

bradknowles wrote: post #180
DoreenMichele wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe that's a feature? ;)

I did think about posting my location for all the world to see, knowing that it wouldn't tell anyone anything at all.

But then I thought "Maybe I just can't figure it out and other people can."

Thus the question. :P

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#185

Post by aschneid »

vr46 wrote: post #6

I had never heard of this until I read the criticism, maybe this is some kind of corollary to the Streisand Effect. Also, it looks right up there with Swatch Internet Time.

The only reason I had heard of it was because my car has it built into the navigation system. So, I can enter a W3W coordinate and my car will appropriately route me.

It's supposedly beneficial when trying to locate a particular person. They can just send you their W3W, the car can read it off the SMS, and automatically provide routing.

I have not used the capability, but explored it when I first got the car since I had never heard of W3W.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#186

Post by jedberg »

donatj wrote: post #104
krisroadruck wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least they tell you that it starts at $150K/year so you know right off the bat if it's even in your ballpark. A lot of SaaS products completely hide thier pricing entirely. I have zero interest in sitting through some sales-bro's phone pitch before I know if I'm even in the right pricing bracket. Nothing like sitting through an hour long preso only to find out afterwards something is 10x what you were looking…

Do they now? They certainly didn't at the time a few years ago. I at the time found some prices online searching around but nothing from them. We were very hopeful we'd get some sort of discount because we're in educational tech, so our income per user is very low, but nope. Free to $100k overnight is insane. We’ve got a guy whose full time job now is basically developing analytics tools for us and it’s a cheaper sol…

Back in the day you you didn't have to pay if you ran a Google Ads campaign. There was no minimum spend. If you ran a monthly AdWords campaign for $1/mo you got free GA no matter what your traffic level was.

The main catch is that GA goes to "sampling mode" once your traffic gets high enough, and I think you have to pay extra to get full datasets.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#187

Post by simias »

zerogvt wrote: post #23

That -apart from being a brilliant idea- seems to be easy to replicate in open source software. Replicate not in being compatible but as a different system altogether. Or has that already happened?

The added value here seems to be the curated, per-language word list. You'd have to be careful with homophones, they say that they use simpler, more common words for populated locations (and locations where the target language is more used) etc...

After playing a bit with their interface I can't really tell if they're successful but it does seem like it would be relatively complicated to come up with such a word list in many languages. That being said, it could probably be crowdsourced.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#188

Post by asow92 »

rtkwe wrote: post #36
asow92 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure downvote me for asking you to be accountable for your dispositions.

Here's the thing 'if you have problems with it build your own' is a useless response. Anyone can totally point out issues with a thing without knowing how to fix them (especially if the concept is fundamentally flawed). Expecting people to go out and found a whole standard/business every time they make a blog post about the problems with something is ridiculous.

We're a community of builders, makers, and entrepreneurs. If we aren't here to fix the issues we see in the world, what are we doing? All I'm saying is if OP truly feels the way they do, they should try to be the change they wish to see in the world. Especially since what w3w is doing isn't technically complicated.

Re: Why Bother with What Three Words?

#189

Post by mirimir »

NikkiA wrote: post #183
mirimir wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's the point of that? If they were always the same two (or three) words, fine. But if there are multiple such encoding systems, any set of three words (foo.bar.baz) is ambiguous. Because it depends on the system being used. So sure, someone might remember "foo.bar.baz". But "foo.bar.baz" in W3W might be in SF. But in Hanoi by some other system. And then we get to the need to pay W3W to generate those codes. T…

TBF The maidenhead system (which is a worldwide standard) IS, IMO fairly easy to remember. And because it's pairs are increasing in area, I can state that I live in IO93 and it narrows it to: https://www.karhukoti.com/maidenhead-grid-square-locator/?gr... or I could give the next 2 characters to narrow it to a 1km x 1km (roughly) area that covers my town, or the 2 letters and 2 numbers that give a small area that pin…

Now that sounds like a very useful system. It's hierarchical. With arbitrary precision. With ~short, easy to remember (and easy to key/speak on radio) codes. Nice.
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