SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIJBUZm1HoY dept.
When it comes to telling someone an address, words beat numbers and letters.
One company is betting that using words to designate a location might be a whole lot easier and quicker in a digital world than using Longitude and Latitude or street addresses. While their system seems unlikely to be widely adopted it does have a certain appeal when combined with a smartphone. Passing addresses to drivers on the road (or friends for a party) can be kind of tricky. Unless you can send it electronically, the chances of remembering a spoken address is slim, and remembering longitude and latitude long enough to write it down or key it into your GPS is zero.
However remembering browser.tapes.outing or limbs.pinning.honk is pretty easy. You don't even have to write them down. Hint: click satellite view to see what those places have in common. You can keep three words in your head long enough to key them into an app, and zoom directly to the address on your smart phone.
The system was developed by What3Words and is already being used in Geographical Information Systems, and other earth mapping applications where there aren't convenient ways to exchange geo-coordinates verbally.
what3words is a universal addressing system based on a 3mx3m global grid.
Each of the 57 trillion 3mx3m squares in the world has been pre-allocated a fixed & unique 3 word address.
Their geocoder turns geographic coordinates into these 3 word addresses & vice-versa.
Using words means non-technical people can find any location accurately and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system like street addresses, postcodes, latitude & longitude or mobile short-links.
People's ability to immediately remember 3 words is near perfect whilst your ability to remember the 16 numbers, decimal points and N/S/E/W prefixes, that are required to define the same location using lat,long is zero.
The company says "We want to give everyone in the world the ability to talk about a precise location as easily as possible." (And by "Give" they mean "Sell".)
There are free Android and iOS apps available from Navmii allowing users to navigate using a simple 3 word address.
Will it catch on? Betteridge says no, but if Google or Apple takes an interest it might become "a thing".
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday November 02 2015, @12:02PM
Cute idea. The precision is high enough that you can move the "pin" over just a few meters and see several different word combinations. Find the one you like for your address. Ideal would be some sort of search function, or way to list all combinations within x meters of a particular point. Probably no one wants to live at "ugly.snotty.slugs".
Of course, critical mass is the problem - you need "everybody" to be aware of this, before it makes any sense. Actually, this company looks to me like one of those founded in hopes that they will be bought up by a real map company. They are probably hoping Google Maps notices that they exist...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gargoyle on Monday November 02 2015, @12:33PM
High precision but with no way to work out what the address nearby might be without having a the database of places and 3 word addresses on you all the time.
At least with Latitude and Longitude, if you know the coordinate, you can tell what a lower resolution co-ordinate will be and remembering the first few digits of each part of a co-ordinate allows me to get close to my destination.
For example in the original post, an example of "limbs.pinning.honk" is given which represents a place on the White Sea, "limb.pinning.honk" represents a place near Khandyga, those 2 places are 8800 km apart by road. If you could guarantee that the places were always that far apart it might be useful since you'd instantly know you've got the wrong address, but since the addresses were assigned randomly, you could find two close addresses which weren't obviously different places.
if for example a place address is found to be confusing due to similarity of addresses nearby, you can't even update the database because every instance of the database would have to be updated with the new address, that means no offline handheld devices could be updated with new address information which to mean would seem to limit the usefullness of the most obvious use case for this system (i.e. providing addresses to a mobile workforce, over poor quality telephone calls) .
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @12:36PM
Their FAQ says:
We have taken out offensive words and homophones (e.g. sale & sail), and have shuffled all of our similar sounding (e.g. plurals) 3 word locations as far away from each other as possible so it’s obvious if you have made a mistake. It’s better to be 400 miles out than 1 mile out so you know instantly that you’re wrong and don’t set off to the wrong place!
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Monday November 02 2015, @01:08PM
We have taken out offensive words
Talk about taking all the fun out of it.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Thexalon on Monday November 02 2015, @04:34PM
More to the point, context can determine when a word is "offensive" or not. For example, a well-known word beginning with the letter "n" is offensive if you're making jokes, probably not particularly offensive if you're singing rap, and probably necessary when discussing history or Mark Twain. And that matters: You can't say the full name of the group NWA, or one of its most popular songs, without saying "offensive" words.
George Carlin was right about the basic problem: A lot of people try to censor the words people use to express offensive thoughts, rather than trying to deal with the offensive thoughts. It's not the n-word you need to be opposed to, it's the racist who's using it!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 02 2015, @04:46PM
I suppose offensive phrases can be generated using individually acceptable words. I have not found any "fun" phrases yet despite all kinds of experimentation. Someone is apparently filtering phrases, not just words.
I suspect they're going to have fun with google bombing type issues, like if someone tried to buy the link "meat.is.dog" or "enjoy.your.salmonella" for the local Chinese takeout place without their approval.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @04:04PM
Oops, sorry that our missile hit your house. It was supposed to hit a target across the globe, but the operator accidentally used plural instead of singular.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by isostatic on Monday November 02 2015, @12:39PM
We couldn't find any results for ugly.snotty.slugs
However, for me at least, it's dropped it in the middle of London, so that's appropiate.
When googling the three words that crop up for my own address, the first result is a porn site.
The major problem with this system is there's no way of knowing "limbs pinning honk" is near "girders costing manliness" or "bracing unrestricted trophy".
Most people in the UK (errantly, yet almost entirely accurately) use postcodes. I know that my great uncle Bob lives at "12 Station Road Holmes Chapel UK". Easy enough to remember, it's also CW4 7AU (somewhere in Holmes Chapel, and not far from CW4 7ET, but nowhere near WA4 7AU)
"including kicked grace" tells me nothing.
Imagine a GPS device that only gave out these 3 words. You could be 5M for your target spot and have no idea about it.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Monday November 02 2015, @01:16PM
The problem for me is that it's completely useless.
Search on my postcode and the three words are harder to remember than the postcode, or even the address.
Move a centimeter to the right and it becomes even worse but, as you say, totally uncorelated to anything useful.
But the name of my street will always get you to within a few hundred yards on the correct street. A number and name is still less than the three words and gets you to the door. And you don't have to worry that Jim navigated to "brown cow rubbish" rather than "what git said", or similar. One mis-spelling or even get the words in the wrong order, and you can be anywhere on the planet. And one "location" can have thousands of descriptors that are all different.
Too much messing about, not enough practical thought, and nowhere near popular enough to advertise your "three words" rather than a postcode or even just address.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Monday November 02 2015, @07:02PM
One mis-spelling or even get the words in the wrong order, and you can be anywhere on the planet.
It is important to understand the difference between how humans memorize numbers and words. Numbers rarely have an association, unless they just happen to match some other sequence or object that you remember. Words are all about associations. Humans will remember not literal words, but their meanings, their images. When recalled, instead of "limbs.pinning.honk" they will recall something else, something similar - perhaps involving monks who allow themselves too much freedom with their extremities. As it is essential to recall the name exactly, you lose everything if you misremember. Even the lat/lon coordinates don't have such a problem - if you need a place at 33.456N and 27.123E, you can start with 33N and 27E and ask around :-) However when you are at the "pimps.beeping.conk," after three days of air travel, you cannot really do much there if in reality you needed "blimps.pegging.wonk"... and there is no checksum even to make sure that the combination of words makes sense.
If humans start getting flooded with senseless 3-word combos, they will all mix up in their memory. It's worse than useless. This is why hierarchical locators are so much in use (country, city, street, building, person.)
It is also important to consider the language. As the system has to be universal and work on the entire planet, it has to be understood by everyone. However there are many scripts and languages on this Earth. Some scripts cannot even encode those words; some readers cannot even read them; and some can read but do not understand the words. (Not that understanding is needed - but without an association those words are just long random tokens.) This problem had been solved by postal systems a long time ago. You can write the country (and, if you wish, the city) in English, and the rest of the address can be in local language - once the letter gets there, the postman will understand what address you want, no matter how the local street numbering system works. In Russia, for example, there is a street, and there is a house number... but that number can belong to several different physical buildings! They are then numbered on another level, under the house, with numbers or letters. The postman knows every delivery location in the area and will have no problem. But try to write that address in a foreign language - terms are essential (дом, корпус, строение) but translation of those is hard, as they mean nearly the same thing.