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frojack writes:

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".

Original Submission