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posted by martyb on Monday November 02 2015, @10:35AM   Printer-friendly
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".


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jcross on Monday November 02 2015, @02:10PM

    by jcross (4009) on Monday November 02 2015, @02:10PM (#257497)

    Exactly, and the new standard is even worse, because the place name changes entirely every 3 meters. Playing around with the map, there seems to be no coherence whatsoever between adjacent grid squares, and thus no way to know that two 3-word addresses are next to each other without converting them to a more coherent system. This is probably good for the company selling the mapping/unmapping service, but an inconvenience to most everyone else. What it probably is good for is telling a taxi driver where to take you, but then again, slurring your words a bit when drunk could land you in Outer Elbonia with a hell of a fare.

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  • (Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:50PM

    by Common Joe (33) <{common.joe.0101} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday November 03 2015, @06:50PM (#258051) Journal

    It's designed that way on purpose. Having "Purple Monkey Dishwasher" next to "Purple Monkey Dishes" could lead to unintended errors. By having a completely different names, one is quite sure that a person meant this 3m x 3m spot and not the other 3m x 3m right next to it.

    • (Score: 2) by jcross on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:57PM

      by jcross (4009) on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:57PM (#258130)

      That's what I figured too, but it doesn't necessarily reduce errors unless you know roughly where the location is supposed to be. For instance, say "Purple Monkey Dishwasher" and "Purple Monkey Dishes" both exist, and one is in my hometown and the other is across the world. If I'm telling one to a taxi driver it will be pretty obvious if I've got the wrong one, but if I put it on a package to mail it would not be. At the same time, if my house is 10 meters wide, it might have 4 legitimate addresses, all entirely different, and that's just counting the ones on the street frontage. One isn't always interested in 3 meter accuracy, and the situation gets even worse if my address resolves to an apartment building and I live on the 4th floor.

      Where the old tradition of named estates still exists, there actually are three word addresses, although not with 3 meter accuracy of course. I know a person whose entire address is in the form , County , Ireland. Basically just three words, but the neat part is you can get some basic information about where it is without looking it up. In other words, the scheme has a transparent hierarchy which this new one lacks.

      • (Score: 2) by jcross on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:58PM

        by jcross (4009) on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:58PM (#258131)

        Whoops, my angle brackets got eaten. It should have been "(Estate), County (Name), Ireland".