https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-....
> The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission.
> If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents.
> You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!
It's also entirely unclear to me why the emergency services dispatchers wouldn't just ask a caller to read out their GPS location from any webservice which can report it. Hell, they could set up "999.gov.uk" or similar to show exactly their GPS location.
If they had a smartphone with GPS and data connectivity so they could download an app, they could use that to share their exact coordinates without having to download this proprietary app that wants to copyright the concept of location.
Just on my homescreen alone I have 4 apps that can already share my exact location: Google Maps, Apple Maps, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger
For example...Why do developers use text names for variables in their programs, and why don't they just use binary - which are clearly more precise? </sarcasm>
If this is in fact a proprietary thing, then I really dislike that. If something is actually, supposedly this useful, then it should be public domain. However, I'll give credit to the founders of what3words for attempting to solve an issue that they ran into (to scratch their itch as it were). Would "fixing" the delivery issue with the government service (postal service in the original case) be the appropriate solution? Would better UI for current GPS apps be another solution? Maybe, probably...But the founders took a hypothesis and ran with it to test it out; kudos to them for that. Clearly, it is working for some people. While no one might argue for the benefits of precision that conventional GPS coordinates bring, what is clear - in real life - is that some people could benefit from an alternative UI for describing their location.
So, a puff piece, yeah sure; it seems it to me. Nifty and novel concept for using an alternative "language" for indicating and describing location; yep. Is it great? I guess we'll see. Does it have to be a whole, different thing, or can it be a layer on top of legacy GPS? Who knows?
Do YOU have a better alternative???
I'm teasing you of course (all in good fun). But you certainly make valid points: what3words isn't perfect...But, i still stand by the point that it's a novel approach, AND that there's an opportunity here (here, i mean an opportunity for the betterment of society, safety, humanity, etc., less about "business opportunity").
>I tried to get people to use longitude and latitude but that never caught on," Mr Sheldrick said.
Well, if it's a life or death situation Mr Sheldrick, I'm pretty sure people would catch on fairly quick
I don't like the fact it's an opaque monopoly, but as a way to designate locations for human use, it's effective.
Long-lat are highly effective precisely because almost anyone can read a number [including dyslexic people], and because the concept of a numeric pair as a GPS location is understood, at least in passing, by almost everybody.
I believe it's just easier for the average person to communicate three words than two multi-digit-precision numbers.
They summarise as "proprietary & commercial, not obvious to humans without the service, and not compatible with maps."
If they had a cell phone and was lost in a forest why didn't they just boot up maps (they had bandwidth enough to download an app) and walk out of there?
They had obviously got to the point of calling the emergency services, so let's make it easier for them to be located, rather than complaining that they should have just got their compass out and sucked it up.
Relevant PG article that always gets brought up here when an article which is obviously a PR effort gets posted here http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
And when I said context, I didn't mean that they would understand what those three words point to, but rather they instantly can read those words having read them before. Long/Lat for most people isn't something they have ever used, so simple things like the "-1" might get missed. Admittedly the operator is likely to know that '1.080278' doesn't make sense given the country they are in and will automatically add the -, but it doesn't hurt to have options?
Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.
Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission. That matters when eg: using a CB radio, or there's a blizzard blowing into a phone's pickup.
You only need 3 decimal places for ~100m accuracy. So really you're talking a 5 digit number and a 4 digit number (in the UK). A sensible presentation of that data would not be hard to read for almost anyone who doesn't have sight problems.
Moreover, a service like the theoretical "999.gov.uk" could log a person's GPS location and give them (say) a three word codephrase to pass to the dispatcher to lookup the record on the backend. No more or less effort, but not proprietary and harder to mess up.
> Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission.
This is true. I don't think there's a good way to fix that with numbers.