Why Bother with What Three Words?

I've built an open source alternative, 3geonames.org.

The code is made up of 3 Geonames, with the first Geoname being the most prominent location name in relation to actual geography, for eg: https://3geonames.org/LONDON-ISUKI-LIPNITA .

The 140k Geonames have a phonetic distance of at least 1 from each other. Support for elevation and an app with voice geocoding is coming soon.

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?

W3w was a pretty nice idea and I know some people that have been involved with the company. However, it is indeed not open. It's also VC funded which means that openness is incompatible with making money for them. Which means that most of its potential is lost or off limits unless you are a paying customer. They have a few of those and have had some success doing deals with postal services in countries that lack formal addresses or for use cases where formal addresses are not that useful, like e.g. logistics or big public venues like airports. But the closed nature of this of course holds back most of the interesting use-cases.

For those who don't know, w3w simply encodes locations to 3 words using an algorithm that translates coordinates into what is probably a quad tree path (e.g. geohash) and breaks that into 3 chunks that get mapped to words. The proprietary part is the algorithm and the mapping of words to these chunks (mappings actually since they have them in several languages). Probably you could reverse engineer the algorithm but then you run into the little problem that the mapping is likely copyrighted, some patents may apply, etc.

There are some nice touches to the algorithm like e.g. associating shorter/common words with the most relevant locations so that if you are German speaking, the German version of the algorithm generates short codes inside Germany and longer ones on the other side of the planet.

A couple of issues with w3w: the codes are not hierarchical. So you can't rely on e.g. the first word denoting a bigger location; the second word denoting locations inside that area, etc. Consequently, two almost identical locations will have completely different words associated with them. So you can't at a glance tell where any combination of words is unless you run the algorithm. They are easy to remember but meaningless.

Open location codes and Geohashes are similar except they don't provide easy to remember human readable codes, which is the reason why neither is commonly used by consumers. However, I've always liked geohashes because things with the same prefix are in the same place, which is awesome if you need to build search engines (though more efficient ways of doing that are available). With 7 or 8 letters you get pretty good accuracy with those and the algorithm for encoding and decoding is pretty simple. OLC is similar but stays closer to the degrees/minuts/seconds notion. Also the codes are longer.

Not OP, but I'd expect that it is because W3W is a basically a marketing campaign for a technology that doesn't actually solve a problem

(or, more precisely, solves one corner of a problem while destroying many much broader solutions)

Creating a knock-off that solves the OS problems still fails to recover from the broader problems that the W3W 'solution' provides zero ability to actually navigate without a continuous link to their server. A knock-off with better OS cred would still fail the same way.

It does exist in developing nations, where street names change very quickly and are not very reliable (and the rusty government can't keep up with the quick development). First hand experience, Vietnam - I currently live in a street that wasn't there a year ago and isn't in Google Maps. If you put it into Google, it will send you to another place, 200 meters away. (They are getting better fast, compared to Apple Maps for example which suck hilariously, but still isn't perfect.)

You can share a long/lat, or a link to Google Maps, but that's hard to write down.

So it's a problem.