Describe Any Location On Earth In 3 Words

First time accepted submitter jameshumphreys writes "London startup what3words has successfully launched a new website which has carved the world map into almost 57 trillion 3m x 3m squares, assigning each square a simple, unique 3 word address. For instance, the 'what3words' for the famous Peter Pan statue in London's Hyde Park is 'union.prop.enjoy'. This means you can easily describe even remote locations with great precision. CEO Chris Sheldrick says, 'We see our service being most useful where current methods of describing location (e.g. postcodes or ZIP codes) don't do the job well enough or don't do the job at all — but of course it has applications as a preferred alternative even where the existing solutions do a decent job, but perhaps less precise/customised than w3w.' An API is planned 'in the coming weeks.'" The heart of Disneyworld could be "Radioactive Humanoid Mice"; what would you call your neck of the woods?

Comments

Phoenx, Arizona

[Valentinial]

Hot Frickin' Desert

Re:Phoenx, Arizona

[Anonymous Coward]

Los Angeles:
Fucking.smoggy.hell

Re:Phoenx, Arizona

[ackthpt]

Los Angeles:
Fucking.smoggy.hell

Los Angeles: La La Land

alternatively: Highways Of Hell

Re:Phoenx, Arizona

[magarity]

Are you stuck in the 70s? LA has some smog but it isn't bad. Try Beijing for serious smog.

Re:Phoenx, Arizona

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Beijing which is located @ world.smog.capital ?

Re:Phoenx, Arizona

[wallsg]

In the same state:
Damn Big Hole
Martian Canal Spotter
Piss Water Skiing
Red Rock Wackos
Falling Hill Town
London Bridge Site
Standing On Corner
Big Dead Birds
Copper to Artists
Shot Down Dead

Re:Phoenx, Arizona

[samdutton]

...or as they say in Australia, GAFA country. Almost three words... (First time I saw this was written over a map in the bar here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Weather_Station.)

Who's gonna get stuck with...

[rnturn]

... "putrid.dung.heap"?

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[Anonymous Coward]

... "putrid.dung.heap"?

In NJ we're known as the 'Armpit of America', which is a close match to yours.

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think DC is the armpit of the nation, NJ just smells like it.

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[Anonymous Coward]

probably.your.neighborhood

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[gstoddart]

... "putrid.dung.heap"?

And why should we expect that to be a unique identifier?

"Miserable.lying.bastards" could be applied to so many places it's not funny.

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[CanHasDIY]

DC is the Asshole of America - Hence the foul odor, hot air, and irritating sounds that originate from within. ... Which is quite an amazing feat, considering that it's situated squarely between the nation's armpit (NJ) and limp dick (FL).

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[ackthpt]

probably.your.neighborhood

Springfield, USA

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[AliasMarlowe]

DC is the Asshole of America - Hence the foul odor, hot air, and irritating sounds that originate from within. ... Which is quite an amazing feat, considering that it's situated squarely between the nation's armpit (NJ) and limp dick (FL).

Until you realize that the Horn of Plenty (White House or Congress, take your pick) is right in there, reaming away in a frenzy.

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[ackthpt]

... "putrid.dung.heap"?

And why should we expect that to be a unique identifier?

"Miserable.lying.bastards" could be applied to so many places it's not funny.

Primarily: Washington DC

Dirty.Greedy.Scum: Pick any Wallstreet investment bank

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[SleazyRidr]

I don't care where it is, I'm moving to fuck.that.shit

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?

No...really. That's my house.

what.the.fuck

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[Dishevel]

Shark.Head.Laser The Changi Airport in Malaysia.

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[GameboyRMH]

An excellent question. But even those may not be as bad as wrinkle.spoon.slanty and the other nonsense that will have to be used once the meaningful phrases are used up.

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[pspahn]

Still better than dirty.little.finger

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[The Grim Reefer]

probably.your.neighborhood

Springfield, USA

Is that the one at the intersection of Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky?

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[AdamHaun]

Nobody, apparently. If you search for it you get no results.

"greedy.lying.weasels", on the other hand, is somewhere in Siberia. Awkward.

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[Anonymous Coward]

probably.your.neighborhood

Springfield, USA (d'oh!)

FTFY (you forgot the 3rd word ;)

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[Anonymous Coward]

So would that be a place that is known for sex with excrement? Or for all the anal sex that happens there?

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[NatasRevol]

*insert your mom's vagina joke*

Re:Who's gonna get stuck with...

[Samantha Wright]

My DSLAM came up as "embedded.fizzled.trial". Still wondering if that's actually the name or just an error message...

You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[Anonymous Coward]

You only need two pieces of information right now - latitude and longitude. Throw in elevation if you really want to be particular. Trying to make everything look like a URL address serves no real purpose.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[cryptizard]

Because most people can't remember a long string of numbers but they can easily remember three english words. It is the same reason people don't carry around 128-bit AES keys in their head, even though it would make for much better security.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[iggymanz]

no, "most" would imply more than 3.5 billion people had that ability. most humans would not have such for english, but maybe in their native tongue.

our computers and cell phones remember such things as GPS very well, let's stick with that.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[cryptizard]

Yes, but unfortunately we don't have a super great interoperable way to exchange those GPS coordinates right now. We do have lots of ways to exchange words. This bridges that gap.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[K. S. Kyosuke]

They also seem to have an uncanny sense of telepathy. I thought about a place, and then I saw the "for example" link, and the link led to the place I was thinking of. That thing is creepy!

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[iggymanz]

no so, we all have cell phones (and other mobile devices) and the infrastructure to send messages by SMTP or SMS. there are billions of mobile devices, in fact in 2014 the number of total mobile devices will exceed the number of humans.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[cryptizard]

Yes, that is my point exactly. Unless both people share the same app for sending and interpreting the GPS coordinates, then you can't do it. But you can always send words in SMS and have the person type those words into a website. Yes, you could also send latitude/longitude, but it is harder and doesn't have the other good uses i.e. voice over a telephone.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need an 'app' to send and interpret GPS coordinates? It's a string of digits, probably with no more than 10 or 15 total to represent enough precision for you. So you type out those 15 digits in an SMS, and the other person types them into their map software or just looks them up or whatever the want. LatLon isn't a complicated data package, we don't need parsers. It's just two numbers.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[iggymanz]

Nonsense, no "shared app" is necessary other than basic email or messaging

N 25 18.340 W 22 28.100

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[cryptizard]

Now what does my mom do with that message? If I give her three words and tell her to type them into this website, it will be much more successful that telling her to do the same with a bunch of numbers she will easily fuck up.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[cryptizard]

What does my mom do with latitude/longitude numbers I text her? It is much easier to tell her to type three words into a web site than have her copy a long string of number which she will definitely fuck up.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[pla]

Because most people can't remember a long string of numbers but they can easily remember three english words.

If you can remember just eight digits - Two groups of four, less than a complete long distance telephone number - That will put you within half a mile of your target location. Add two more digits (the length of an LD phone number including the "1"), and it puts you to less than a football field away.

Then again, we have DNS in the first place because non-geeks couldn't manage four groups of three, so, I don't seriously expect them to do much better with lat&long.

/ob "Correct Horse Battery Staple"

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[dAzED1]

email her a link to a google map of that precise location, then. Create a list of locations you like - your favorite knitting, candle, and cat supplies stores - and then share that location list with your mom. Everything she needs to access those locations is already on her smartphone, most likely. The vast majority of humans don't speak english well - fark, we can't even get half the people here in the US to do it. Numbers though - those are a certainty. Telling someone to write down a series of numbers works easily, asking them to write down words they may not know is not. Those words only being useful at a specific website, which then does nothing more than give you the location... Yeah, I get it, they're trying to be for latitude/longitude what DNS is for IP space. But silly "flying.monkey.dung" names isn't the way to do that.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[cbiltcliffe]

So now, instead, you've got to give her the three words, plus the URL of the website, which she will easily fuck up.

3words.....what?
What three words?
Oh...type into my browser....
ok...
www.what.three.words.com
I don't get anything.
Oh..ok.
www.what.3.words.com
It's still not working.
Grrrr.
www.what3.words.com
This stupid thing!
Just give me your damned latitude and longitude!!!

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Because most people can't remember a long string of numbers but they can easily remember three english words. It is the same reason people don't carry around 128-bit AES keys in their head, even though it would make for much better security.

So you're saying it's easier to try and memorize 3 words for each of the 57 trillion locations?
There isn't any kind of cohesive system for this. There's no way to look at one "address" and then infer neighboring addresses, for example. It simply has nothing which allows for easy reference, without access to this company's service you can't look them up on a map.
Basically what they're selling is a marketing tool. They want businesses to pay them to name a location, so people can search for the name of that location and see it on a map. Which begs the question, why not just search for the name of the business in the first place?

The only problem this seems to solve is the problem of these guys not having enough of your money in their wallets.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[dantotheman]

At this level, wouldn't we just be sending a street address that can be typed into Google maps anyways? I imagine if you are telling someone about a location that doesn't have a street address, that someone better be smart enough to handle lat/long points if they are going to actually visit the location.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[cryptizard]

Yes, it's like DNS for locations. How is that hard to get.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[cryptizard]

There are lots of places that don't have a street address but would be interesting to regular people, i.e. a certain location in a large park, a place on the beach, a place on a big college campus, etc.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[BasilBrush]

Lat/long is like an IP address. Does the job but very unmemorable for humans.

This idea is like a domain name. With all possible locations on earth pre-seeded with 3 random words, and the possibility to buy a single word version of your choice.

If you don't like it don't use it. But if it caught on it might be quite useful. And it's a clever business model.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[dAzED1]

DNS was created as an international standard to solve a problem that was well established, and for which less elegant solutions were already in place. Where's the equiv in this situation, for RFC805?

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[BasilBrush]

email her a link to a google map of that precise location, then.

On that basis we don't need domain names either. Just email people IP addresses.

The vast majority of humans don't speak english well

And there's nothing special about English in this system. If someone is conversing to you in French they'll go to the French version of the website and use 3 French words. The addresses are only as portable as the language used to express them, but in practice that's not much of a drawback. Even less so than with domain names.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[BasilBrush]

Yeah, I get it, they're trying to be for latitude/longitude what DNS is for IP space. But silly "flying.monkey.dung" names isn't the way to do that.

So you purchase a "OneWord" of your choice. Just as you'd purchase a domain name of your choice.

The 3 word system is the marketing system. Their business model is selling location domain names that people chose.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[BasilBrush]

There's an app for that.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[Khashishi]

Yes, but the three words are completely useless without the database of locations. Latitude and longitude are useful without much context.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[NatasRevol]

https://www.google.com/maps?q=N+25+18.340+W+22+28.100

Should do it.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[expatriot]

You could do latitude and longitude in four words and there would be a pattern to it. You would instantly know (assuming there was some sort of order in the words) approximately the location.

Approximately 1300000 minutes in a circle by as a rough guess. Two words out of 2000 common words would give the longitude and two more give the latitude.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[RoccamOccam]

Approximately 1300000 seconds in a circle

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[mcmonkey]

Because most people can't remember a long string of numbers but they can easily remember three english words. It is the same reason people don't carry around 128-bit AES keys in their head, even though it would make for much better security.

And that's why phone numbers never made it in to common use.

Oh wait, they did. Because while most people have trouble with a long series of unrelated digits, such as with an AES key, they generally can remember short strings of related digits.

So remembering your location to a reasonable level of precision involves at most 10 digits: a group of 3 + group of 2 for latitude and a group of 3 + group of 2 for longitude, such as 41.43,-75.67.

And then you not only know where you are, you can divine details such as 41 is between 42 and 44. Latitude and longitude gives you an idea of the distance between two points and what things are nearby. A sustem of 3 random words tells you nothing. "Purple Monkey Dishwasher"--is that where you are? is it next door? is it the other side of the world? There's no (systematic) way to know!

I see no use for this 3 word system.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[KapUSMC]

Except DNS lets us use things that make sense. If I'm looking for Cisco, Cisco.com is a logical place to start. 72.163.4.161 holds no significance to me, and I probably won't look there by default. This is not like DNS. blackberry.zeta.pnder would be just as random and unmemorable to the average person as 72.163.4.161 and eliminate what makes DNS useful. stupid.fucking.standard

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[Coffeesloth]

I agree with you, especially since you can't assign the words yourself and they are too arbitrary to associate with a physical place. As a marketing tool its of extremely limited value. Can you see a business wanting to be known as hot.banana.rug? Seriously, going to the example of "'union.prop.enjoy" and then look over to the London Paddington rail station, there are several dozen names for the station because of the size of the area used to define a location. One location gives you "civic.food.walks" and a short distance from that you get "years.bits.oasis". There are probably dozens of "names" in their database all pointing to London Paddington station. I can't see how this is going to be anything but mass confusion...

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[H0p313ss]

What three words?
Oh...type into my browser....
ok...
www.what.three.words.com
I don't get anything.
Oh..ok.

My Dad's 68, has a Phd. in Metallurgy and a masters in Physics. He's been using PCs for 30 years (and mainframes before that). I have yet to watch him follow the instructions "type into the address bar" successfully on the first try.

My step-mother actually programmed mainframes in the 70's, to get to any website she starts at google... When I visited them last month I had to remove three different search-toolbar addon/trojans ...

What surprises me is that they both understand the difference between IE, Firefox and Chrome. They figured out by themselves that they could share a single windows login most of the time if they used different browsers.

I don't know how ordinary mortals manage to be productive with computers without techie angel following them around.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[Anonymous Coward]

So remembering your location to a reasonable level of precision involves at most 9 digits: a group of 2 + group of 2 for latitude and a group of 3 + group of 2 for longitude, such as 41.43,-75.67.

FTFY... Latitudes are between -90 and 90.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to tell her any of the digits past the 5th or 6th decimal place.
So, you really don't trust your mom to get a number from you that is not much longer than a phone number?
How did she ever get your number to begin with if you hate your mom so much?

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, because everyone knows how to spell every word with 100% accuracy.

In reality a lot of people fuck up spelling very simple and very common words, constantly.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[N1AK]

Phones first came about without numbers, you asked the operator for the person and they looked them up. Phone numbers came in because it was a technically simple solution, if a user interface that let people phone for example or some such then numbers wouldn't have reached common usage. There are plenty of things that were in common use that have died off today because we have better alternatives.

Phone numbers pretty much have died off these days. I know perhaps 15 but can instantly call ~1,000 people between work and home from my phone contacts without even needing to see the number itself. With things like Hangouts/Skype becoming more widely used phone numbers are rapidly becoming more and more like IP addresses.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[LordVader717]

Why would you want to memorize each location? It's all about memory efficiency and maximizing the mutual information. Predictability will inevitably suffer, but that's a fair trade off for some applications.

Which can you remember or communicate better, both of which have about the same precision:
1) Shot Mental Sunbeam
2) All of the following characters decimal characters: 61.5299 -144.4334

Of course it's not very useful for businesses, it works against their branding. It's mostly useful for remote locations or stuff not on Google Maps (fairly common in some countries).

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[iggymanz]

you send Mom a link, obviously. she has email and a browser and everything

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[Man Eating Duck]

no so, we all have cell phones (and other mobile devices) and the infrastructure to send messages by SMTP or SMS. there are billions of mobile devices, in fact in 2014 the number of total mobile devices will exceed the number of humans.

It's really too bad that smartphones and apps generally don't recognise "-?([0-8]\d|90|\d)\.\d{1,}, ?-?([0-8]\d|90|\d)\.\d{1,}" as a gps location. Why it isn't a universal copy/paste option in all map and location applications is beyond me. The closest street address is completely useless when you're in the middle of a forest, or even in a park.

I agree that being able to write (or even understand it) is not important, as you'll need a map application on a device which probably has the capability of receiving text. It's easier for everyone involved to do it in a couple of clicks, rather than for the sender to read some words and for the receiver to type those words in. The three-words thing is neat, but it's a solution in search of a problem.

On a side note: what I'm missing in my country, and it really irks me, is an unambiguous way to specify a street address. There is a "Church Street 4" every few tens of kilometers. The UK solved that problem brilliantly with short codes consisting of letters and numbers, kind of a zip code for every single address. It's a problem which most people encounter *every single day*, carrying a very real cost in time and money, and no-one seems to care.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[dantotheman]

True, but how is giving "mom" three words to type into an app any easier than lat/long numbers? My point is more that someone bold enough to seek out a random location based on an app and just a couple words, is probably smart enough to use lat/long for more accurate location anyways. I'm thinking about something like geocaching here.

Re:You can do it with just latitude / longitude

[Anonymous Coward]

i had the exact same problem with someone typing videoland.org instead of videolan.org when prompted verbally, and that's only two words

three words brings the chance of success as close to 0% as one can hope to get without invoking calculus, and it's closer than you might imagine

if on a 3x3 meter grid of points covering the earth's surface:
dd = -179.9 .. 180 i live on the international date line on a pykrete island accreted from the sea with solar-powered thermoelectric coolers, you insensitive clod
hh, mm, ss = 0 .. 60

2d coords in:
ddd hh mm ss | ddd hh mm ss

hash it:
hash("dddhhmmssdddhhmmmss") = a long and entertaining number

select three words from a word list whose indices are subparts of that number

people conveniently have a massive neural network integrated into their bodies, which is designed to find and make use of patterns

it's made of meat, but it still outperforms most other meat blobs or computers in pattern recognition as long as the search space can be adequately represented internally

with civic or gps addresses, there are geographic patterns and similarity which are easy to use

with this site you have three words a computer pulled out of a hat using the power of millions of dollars of venture funding

i want an article on convincing the mammon worshippers at dice holdings that there's mutual profit in advertising a service that will be regarded (in terms of worldwide average person-hours of thought per year) with less contempt than swatch internet time, because fewer people will spend any time thinking of this blatant buyout-seeking money grab at all after their enterprise dies, which if it has any decency will do so before foisting any more of this terrible idea upon a completely uncaring world

then again gravatar is still around

things people will search for:
1. their own address
2. their friends
3. their workplace maybe
4. somewhere in their town maybe
5. somewhere random maybe
6. this app is boring (they're apps now, not sites)

39 out of 54 trillion combos result in ocean

no.no.no

[peon_a-z,A-Z,0-9$_ !]

Without being able to look up the mapping from the database, the three words don't seem to be useful.

Perhaps it be paired with Longitude and Latitude; making a really useful yet *boring* system all of a sudden more *fun*, yet still accessible without access to the database.

Re:no.no.no

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Without being able to look up the mapping from the database, the three words don't seem to be useful."

Exactly, consumer! Our awesome new system replaces those pesky, confusing, 'numbers' that hurt your little head and interoperate with basically any map, globe, or other geography system on earth, with three simple words that are meaningful only in the context of our proprietary service! Isn't it great?

Just think of the possibilities: will it be more lucrative to charge fees for service? Or maybe mine people's queries for marketable insights about their behavior?

Re:no.no.no

[Anonymous Coward]

"Without being able to look up the mapping from the database, the three words don't seem to be useful."

Exactly, consumer! Our awesome new system replaces those pesky, confusing, 'numbers' that hurt your little head and interoperate with basically any map, globe, or other geography system on earth, with three simple words that are meaningful only in the context of our proprietary service! Isn't it great?

Just think of the possibilities: will it be more lucrative to charge fees for service? Or maybe mine people's queries for marketable insights about their behavior?

Are three words too hard to remember? Why, for a small yearly fee, you can choose your own unique one word to identify the 3m x 3m you choose. Get one for the home, one for the office, and one for that special someone!

Seriously, this looks like a website trying to convince people that this is a service that they absolutely must have, enough to spend real actual money on (every year), even though it may or may not be any better than the old LAT & LON system. i.e. they've manufactured their own cash grab.

Re:no.no.no

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Anything that reminds you of AOL Keywords can't be a bad thing, can it?

Re:no.no.no

[BasilBrush]

Just think of the possibilities: will it be more lucrative to charge fees for service? Or maybe mine people's queries for marketable insights about their behavior?

This is one of those rare things - a startup with a real business model that includes where the money comes from. The 3 words bit is the free service that promotes the idea. They make their money by selling an optional single word of the buyers choice. By subscription.

If the idea takes off, they'll make money. If it doesn't take off then advertising and selling access to 3 words won't save them.

Re:no.no.no

[MickLinux]

Agreed. Water.water.everywhere yields something maybe 500 miles NE of the Ural Sea.

Near a drainage ditch... in a farmer's field. So "...and not a drop to drink..." doesn't even apply.

It would be better if the words could be made to apply, somehow. Maybe it requires a whole sentence, I dunno.

Re:no.no.no

[idontgno]

I think blackmail is the only way this service will work.

"Nice little town square you have here. It'd be a terrible shame if it were to become associated with a nasty 3word tag like "skank.drugs.filth", right? Maybe we can help you out with that."

Re:no.no.no

[nabsltd]

"Without being able to look up the mapping from the database, the three words don't seem to be useful."

Exactly, consumer!

Yes, that's precisely the point. They are trying to sell you "one word'.

They do this by picking the words first and not allocating them to a location until you click "share". If you don't like the words, you can "share" them while pointing to a location you don't like. Then, you get another set of words.

So, there's no magical algorithm at work here...it's just a random number generator, and once someone writes an app that "shares" some random location until the words that come up are within some target set, and then fixes that in place on the desired location, their whole business model of selling words goes down the drain.

Even worse, the system will be gamed until every three word triplet will be assigned to someplace, and then the service is completely useless. Doing the math shows that they'd need 39,000 or so words in their pool, and although that's far less than in the English language, they need to use words that are easy to spell, not easy to confuse phonetically, and common enough for people to know them. But, words in the 30K-40K most frequently used range only appear about 20 times per BILLION words.

Re:no.no.no

[MasaMuneCyrus]

"Without being able to look up the mapping from the database, the three words don't seem to be useful."

Exactly, consumer!

Yes, that's precisely the point. They are trying to sell you "one word'.

They do this by picking the words first and not allocating them to a location until you click "share". If you don't like the words, you can "share" them while pointing to a location you don't like. Then, you get another set of words.

You can go to their website right now, find any random obscure place, then get another computer and go to that exact same obscure place. You'll get the same address. Yes, the words are random, but no, they are not made up on the fly. I don't know where you got that from.

As the article mentions, they divided up the world into "57 trillion 3m x 3m squares." Each square corresponds to a latitude and longitude. When you click on a place on the map, it queries the nearest square and gives you that 3word address.

This is the dumbest idea ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, what the fuck. Why would you ever need to use this? I'm trying to figure out how the hell they would monetize this as well? Is this an article from The Onion?

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[gl4ss]

monetizing is simple. they expect dolts to pay them a yearly cost for upkeeping a special address for you.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[stillpixel]

It does seem rather stupid and useless. It seems to me just a way to crowd source descriptions of a large number of locations, once that is done to a high level of density, you can monetize the data in some way I would guess. But again, useless and stupid for any real use.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[Tim12s]

This is going to catch on. Stupid ideas always do.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[Lunix Nutcase]

They want to be bought by a Google for a billion. Hence all the hype building.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[stillpixel]

I'd mod you up if I had some points today.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Google.please.buyout

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[jones_supa]

Exactly. A week from now, this will be one of the hottest phenomenons on the web.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[eth1]

This is going to catch on. Stupid ideas always do.

Perhaps it might be stupid from a usefulness perspective, but it would almost be worth doing just for the awesome potential to assign snarky labels to all sorts of places. :)

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[Tim12s]

Its easy to reproduce. Every mapping company is probably generating their own database right now. They will fight to the death because its stupidly easy to replicate. In the end, Google will dominate because people will take those 3 words and put them in the google search box instead of the custom mapping application.

Google will have to be careful not to be seen to be using their perceived "monopoly" power based on android devices when they replicate this otherwise they're fked.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[Anonymous Coward]

I see it as a casual holiday destination finder and places to visit in towns.
I mean, where would you rather go? stinking.dirty.junkies or goddamn.tasty.food?

It is, seriously, like a visual wiki for entire towns, and that is actually pretty damn useful. No, stick with me here.
Have you seen Wikipedia articles for average towns? They differ SO much from 2 towns right next to each other. Tourism sites try to, y'know, make the town sound bad so only positives. The rest is hidden in the noise...
Sure, it will be messed with for a while, but I assume they show the 3 most popular which will tend towards accuracy over time.
Also a great way to actually help in finding a new home in another distant place in addition to the usual searches on services. Or an extended holiday. Now you likely will know where bad areas are. Sure, those people could change it too, but the more street savvy gangs would LIKE being labelled most of the time since it would be like some sort of gang claiming map to them. It is like IRL EVE situation over time with "ownership" in a sense. You see tags in areas all over the place.

Sad thing is I had a similar idea, but more for services. Then Google Maps got all those features so I ditched it.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[BasilBrush]

Just yesterday, I was meeting up with others in a park tjhat I didn't know. I got the message "at the top car park of the park". Notions such as "the top car park" are not so easy to find on a map. There was certainly no way for me to find it with my GPS. It just had the outline of the park itself. I had to find a local person to ask them directions to the top car park.

With this system, they could have arranged the meet-up point at the nicest part of the park, and everyone with a smartphone would have been able to go straight there.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[NatasRevol]

exwife.whore.thief

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee if only someone already had something like that.

http://www.geocaching.com/

http://www.google.com/maps

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[nschubach]

Search seems broken though.

http://what3words.com/ocean ... puts you out in the middle of the ocean, but the words are "readable.aahing.everywhere"
http://what3words.com/armpit+of+america ... sucks to be Battle Mountain, Nevada ... but the words there are "ledge.punks.nets"
http://what3words.com/pie ... "drama.ambulances.dice"

I can't figure out how their search works if you don't put in precisely 3 words divided by periods.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[pescadero]

have you looked at the site? Here is the master plan for monetization:

Buy OneWord

A OneWord is a personalised word of letters and numbers for a location of your choice. Read more...

All OneWords start with *

  GBP 0.99 – 1 year GBP 2.49 – 3 years GBP 3.99 – 5 years GBP 7.49 – 10 years

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[ahabswhale]

Did you even try the site? It has nothing to do with crowdsourcing. It's actually pretty brilliant (especially if they could get google into integrate it into its maps app).

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[ahabswhale]

What's stupid about it? Enlighten me.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[bruce_the_loon]

It might be if it were crowd-sourced, but it looks more like they randomly generated the triplets and assigned them to squares. There's no descriptive data in there at all.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[ahabswhale]

Because three words are easy to remember. Full street addresses aren't. Is that too complicated for you to understand?

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[HornWumpus]

Hopefully not. Hopefully it will be IGNORED as one of the dumbest ideas ever.

/. should help it die. I can't imagine anybody from here gave them a nickle, much less incorporated their 'thinking' into a product of any kind.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[BluBrick]

Exactly. A week from now, this will be one of the hottest phenomenons on the web.

Ahh, but a month from then, it will be passé.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[bdwebb]

Okay I'll take a crack. TFS states that the 3 word summary for the Peter Pan statue is 'union.prop.enjoy' instead of 'peter.pan.statue' or 'pan.statue.landmark'. If union.prop.enjoy is an example of what we can expect, then none of the 3 word summaries will have anything to do with the locations or objects they purport to describe except to give us very arbitrary word associations.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[Anonymous Coward]

Without this system, they could have arranged the meet-up point at the nicest part of the park, and everyone with a smartphone or GPS or a map... would have been able to go straight there.

FTFY!

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[ahabswhale]

What's easier to remember, union.prop.enjoy or a full street address? What if there is no street address? Is it easier to remember long/lat coordinates? I don't think so. Of course they monetized the site by allowing you to buy a single word address for those who think three words is just too much.

Re:This is the dumbest idea ever

[bdwebb]

Is it easier for you to remember words that have no relation to the location whatsoever, or even to one another for that matter, than a street address or lat/long coordinates? For me it is just as difficult because they are meaningless. If the 3 words represented a descriptor for the location or anything along those lines, I would be with you...what we see here, though, is arbitrary, useless words that correlate to nothing except a seemingly random spot in the world - retarded.

Ultimately it is like saying 65.55.58.201 is MUCH more difficult to remember than juggle.hairball.foam when you're trying to get to Microsoft's website. The point of using words for referencing locations or things is that they describe those locations or things. Again - peter.pan.statue I am totally on board with being a 3 word descriptor for a site that may not have an address. It is easily searchable and MUCH easier to remember than any street address that may exist but even still, Google does this already for any interesting landmarks simply by searching, even when there is not a street address associated with the site.

This seems like something that further obfuscates things and removes any sort of descriptive context from it that would make the service usable.

So...

[xeio87]

It's a TinyUrl for map coordinates, but more human memorable?

Re:So...

[plover]

It's a TinyUrl for map coordinates, but more human memorable?

Exactly! And you can pay them extra if you want a single word to refer to a specific wedge of dirt.

Re:So...

[bdwebb]

Except it is not memorable because the 3 words don't describe anything you would normally associate with the location. Look at the example they give for the Peter Pan statue...'union.prop.enjoy' instead of 'peter.pan.statue' or 'pan.statue.landmark'. If union.prop.enjoy is an example of what we can expect, then none of the 3 word summaries will have much of anything to do with the locations or objects they purport to describe except to give us very arbitrary word associations.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but then you'd end up with collisions with/confusion between all the other Peter Pan statues.

1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[K. S. Kyosuke]

embrace.extend.extinguish anyone?

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[rsborg]

embrace.extend.extinguish anyone?

Wouldn't developers.developers.developers be more appropriate to the current CEO?

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[Anonymous Coward]

lol I wish I had mod points for this

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[Anonymous Coward]

chair.duck.toolate

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[fizzup]

For what it's worth, that's a spot on the shore of God's Lake in northern Manitoba. Not a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there either.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[strength_of_10_men]

fear.uncertainty.doubt

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[fizzup]

Close. That's in the Pacific ocean off the coast of Oregon.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[Kjella]

I'm sure their building is larger than 3x3 meter so they have room for both and bring.more.chairs as well :)

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[xaxa]

http://what3words.com/chair.duck.late -- West of Brisbane.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[Anonymous Coward]

ms.launch.chair

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[Anonymous Coward]

"developers.developers.developers" is the 3x3 in the Atlantic Ocean, about halfway between Miami, FL and West Africa. There's absolutely no logic behind the 3-words.

I'm not sure how this 3-words system is supposed to help. It provides less data points than (lat, long), which is easier to index in a database, I suppose. Don't existing R-Tree indexes do just as well, for 3x3 bounding-boxes?

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[cbiltcliffe]

And developers.developers.developers is in the middle of the North Atlantic.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[gman003]

It's about ease of vocal communication. I could tell you that I'm at 31.415926N 54.589793W, or I could tell you that I'm at signal.shot.fleet. Which would be easier to send over a voice channel?

Basically, it's the same reason you went to slashdot.org, not to 216.34.181.45. Words are easier than numbers for people to use.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[istartedi]

copy.apple.badly.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[UnknownSoldier]

I was thinking more along the lines.

fuck.developers.over

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[Anonymous Coward]

that would be the "uncertainty" part of it.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[plover]

http://what3words.com/copy.apple.badly is just outside Oxford, England. More specifically, it appears to be KC Skipp Plumbing and Heating in Cogges.

Yeah, I can see this catching on, at least long enough to sell enough $0.99 apps to retire. http://what3words.com/clever.those.limes

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[BasilBrush]

It's a free app. It needs to be free as they need critical mass to get it adopted.

Their business model is selling user selected one-words.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[Kjella]

Ah, so that's where IBM's secret underwater lair is. Remember, they invented FUD while the rest are just copycats. I also predict sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[yotto]

It's about ease of vocal communication. I could tell you that I'm at 31.415926N 54.589793W, or I could tell you that I'm at signal.shot.fleet. Which would be easier to send over a voice channel?

Basically, it's the same reason you went to slashdot.org, not to 216.34.181.45. Words are easier than numbers for people to use.

The big difference is, slashdot chose their name, and it at least tangentially refers to what they do. Unless you sell military grade naval communication equipment, that name isn't very descriptive.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[JesseMcDonald]

If the goal is merely to use words rather than digits, you can easily encode longitude and latitude to approximately 10x5m resolution (22 bits each) using four words from a standard 2048-word dictionary, deterministically, and without relying on a third-party database. That should be more than enough to identify a particular building or plot of land.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[Nerdfest]

I'll assume that somewhere in Cupertino there's a "holding.it.wrong".

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[SuperKendall]

It's about ease of vocal communication. I could tell you that I'm at 31.415926N 54.589793W

Was that signal.shot.fleet or single.shot.fleet? I got it confused in the voice transmission. One's in New York, one's in Philidelphia... there's a lot lower chance of me getting a four digit lat/long wrong due to mixups like that. 31.415 & -54.589 is not that hard to get across. And if you want a human understandable name, it already exists - it's called "the name of the place you are meeting at".

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[zeugma-amp]

If the goal is merely to use words rather than digits, you can easily encode longitude and latitude to approximately 10x5m resolution (22 bits each) using four words from a standard 2048-word dictionary, deterministically, and without relying on a third-party database. That should be more than enough to identify a particular building or plot of land.

This would actually be useful.

Code that up and get back to us.

I'll bet it could be done in a shell script.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[mcmonkey]

It's about ease of vocal communication. I could tell you that I'm at 31.415926N 54.589793W, or I could tell you that I'm at signal.shot.fleet. Which would be easier to send over a voice channel?

Basically, it's the same reason you went to slashdot.org, not to 216.34.181.45. Words are easier than numbers for people to use.

And then what? If you send me longitude and latitude coordinates, I can tell how far away you are form me. I can tell what things are close to you.

If you let me to know to meet you at "signal.shot.fleet"...ok. Now what? Is that north of where I am? Do I take the highway? It's just a random sequence. I'm at "signal.shot.enterprise". Does that mean I'm in the next 3x3 block? The next county over? The other side of the world? You haven't transmitted any actual information.

Yes, it's easier and shorter to communicate than map coordinates or a street address with city, state, provence, etc, but you've made the communication easier by removing all the information from the signal.

As others have said here, it's so stupid there's no this isn't the biggest thing by next week.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[ravenscar]

This is a much better idea. The three word combination has several problems. First, it is arbitrary. blue.genteal.kilowatt could be anywhere. green.angry.beaver might be right next store. You'd never know just by looking at the names. Which brings us to part two - to get any use out of the names you need access to a database maintained by a 3rd party - one that could go away at any moment and which is probably only available with internet access.

Your method allows easy-to-remember words that can be linked to things for which context is readily available (most maps and globes will do and a simple mapping program will be even better).

The one thing it doesn't account for is language differences. cat.dog.snow is probably different in English than in Inuit or Korean.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[steelfood]

chairs.chairs.chairs

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[JesseMcDonald]

If the goal is merely to use words rather than digits, you can easily encode longitude and latitude to approximately 10x5m resolution (22 bits each) using four words from a standard 2048-word dictionary, deterministically, and without relying on a third-party database. That should be more than enough to identify a particular building or plot of land.

This would actually be useful.

Code that up and get back to us.

#! /usr/bin/env ruby

WORDS = (0..2047).map { |i| i.to_s }

def encode(lat, lng)
lat_int = (((lat + 90.0) / 180.0) * (2**22)).to_i;
lng_int = (((lng + 180.0) / 360.0) * (2**22)).to_i;
indices = [(lat_int >> 11) & 0x7ff, lat_int & 0x7ff,
(lng_int >> 11) & 0x7ff, lng_int & 0x7ff];
return indices.map { |i| WORDS[i] }.join(' ');
end

def decode(s)
s =~ /^\s*(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s*$/;
a, b, c, d = [$1, $2, $3, $4].map { |word| WORDS.index(word) };
lat_int = (a << 11) | b;
lng_int = (c << 11) | d;
return [(lat_int * 180.0 / (2**22)) - 90.0,
(lng_int * 360.0 / (2**22)) - 180.0];
end

Substitute any appropriate 2048-entry word list for WORDS. This code just uses the string forms of the indices.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[plover]

Thanks, I hadn't downloaded it yet. Just checked it out, it's pretty much what I expected. Rows of meaningless icons across the top and bottom that do many inexplicable and non-intuitive things, a Google map beneath everything that displays a 3D view making it hard to locate yourself in a downtown office building. It's definitely an appropriately "1.0" version for an iPhone, so if you download it expect many updates to follow in the coming weeks.

That is if you don't delete the app first.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[Anonymous Coward]

That actually drops me on some island in manitoba. Kinda interesting.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[megrims]

Using a word list like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGP_word_list would even make it safe(ish) for verbal communication.

I like this idea quite a bit.

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[PatSand]

Wonder where this puts you: spam.spam.spam I would think either in England (for Monty Python)...

Re:1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

[Anonymous Coward]

developers.developers.developers appears to be in more or less the exact center of the Atlantic.

longitude and latitude

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I am confused how this is better than longitude and latitude? I can use L&L offline, and it can have almost an infinite precision. Also, with my memory I am no more likely to remember the 3 words here than a long string of numbers.

Re:longitude and latitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure about that? A long string of numbers to sufficiently identify a location is pretty much just a bunch of words, many more than 3. We have an easy time remembering our xkcd-style router password, and that's 4 random words. (And it's not even correct horse battery staple!)

Re:longitude and latitude

[Hobadee]

So, I am confused how this is better than longitude and latitude? I can use L&L offline, and it can have almost an infinite precision. Also, with my memory I am no more likely to remember the 3 words here than a long string of numbers.

*ALMOST* infinite precision? Add another decimal place and you get better precision. Keep adding them and you get infinite precision. Hell, you could keep adding decimal places until you get down to a specific atom! (Although that would be rather silly and probably impossible to actually measure with today's technology.)

Re:longitude and latitude

[slew]

So, I am confused how this is better than longitude and latitude? I can use L&L offline, and it can have almost an infinite precision. Also, with my memory I am no more likely to remember the 3 words here than a long string of numbers.

You can't charge licensing fees for L&L, but you can for OneWord shortcuts to a 3-word location name...

Do you mean why is it better for you ? Well, you'll have to answer that one for yourself...

Re:longitude and latitude

[thoth]

I'm sure some people dismissed URL shorterners when they first appeared as well.
I think it's a cool service.

Re:longitude and latitude

[tftp]

I'm sure some people dismissed URL shorterners when they first appeared as well. I think it's a cool service.

Just wait until you stumble upon a shortened URL that leads to a CP honeypot.

Re:longitude and latitude

[HornWumpus]

We've identified the target audience. The same twits who think URL shorteners are useful.

Re:longitude and latitude

[yotto]

So, I am confused how this is better than longitude and latitude? I can use L&L offline, and it can have almost an infinite precision. Also, with my memory I am no more likely to remember the 3 words here than a long string of numbers.

*ALMOST* infinite precision? Add another decimal place and you get better precision. Keep adding them and you get infinite precision. Hell, you could keep adding decimal places until you get down to a specific atom! (Although that would be rather silly and probably impossible to actually measure with today's technology.)

Until you get so small as to bump into the realm of Quantum Mechanics, and then you literally can't say for certain - ever - if a specific thing is at one location or another.

Re:longitude and latitude

[Old Wolf]

Until you get so small as to bump into the realm of Quantum Mechanics, and then you literally can't say for certain - ever - if a specific thing is at one location or another.

You can, but you wouldn't know where it was going

Re:longitude and latitude

[socceroos]

So basically, until you run into a plank?

um okay

[lister king of smeg]

So they give everywhere 3x3 meter square a random three words name to make it easier to tell some one the exact place you are refering to beacause it may or may not have postal code, have they not heard of gps coordinates it?

Re:um okay

[cryptizard]

Have you not realized that three english words are easier to remember than 12-20 random numbers?

Re:um okay

[Endovior]

Pretty much, yeah... an interesting idea, but more or less useless, in my opinion. The only advantage words have over numbers is that words can be easier to remember. Unfortunately, these words are only accessible online. If you have web access, then more or less by definition you have a device that you can takes notes on. Accordingly, you can record exact coordinates with essentially the same amount of effort it'd take to record random words.

Re:um okay

[mblase]

Have you not realized that three english words are easier to remember than 12-20 random numbers?

...unless you're not an English speaker.

Which is significant, if this is being used to identify locations on a *global* scale.

Re:um okay

[i kan reed]

But what reason would you use those 3 words? "Street, street, city" is the 3 word human memorable identifier that is already in common use.

Re:um okay

[Deep Esophagus]

Remembering three English words is only useful if there was some descriptive value to the words tying them uniquely to that place. So you tell me to meet you at foo.bar.baz. Where the hell is that? How do I get there from plugh.plover.frobozz?

Re:um okay

[cryptizard]

Unless it's like in the middle of a field, or in a park. Then you're out of luck.

Re:um okay

[cryptizard]

Through the website obviously. That is their service.

Re:um okay

[CrimsonAvenger]

57 trillion locations, with three words each, with no duplicate IDs. Hmm, 38,000+ uniquely spelled words required to be able to do this.

Hmmm, not sure whether I know 38,000 uniquely spelled words or not. But I'm willing to bet most people don't.

Re:um okay

[cryptizard]

Give it a try. Go around and pick places and see if you find words you don't know. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I tried for a while and I didn't come up with any.

Re:um okay

[gl4ss]

yeah, like, unless the park has a name.
anyways if people were using geocoordinates then for most places in your life the beginning would be the same.

you know what's handy about that system? determining the point doesn't depend on a service provided by an api. you cannot turn these guys coords into locations without their db and since they decided to sell places you have to connect to the live db. so while you might remember the coords in one form, it's not gonna do you much good without internet and then on device it might just as well have been the geocoords.

Re:um okay

[cryptizard]

Also it might be that they generate these things on demand, so the first time anyone puts the cursor a spot that has never been named they come up with a fresh one. Probably a huge fraction of the spots will never be clicked, so you could save some identifier space that way.

Re:um okay

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you not realized that three english words are easier to remember than 12-20 random numbers?

They're not random.

Re:um okay

[cryptizard]

I'm not saying this is the end all, be all of location systems, just pointing out that it is kind of interesting and has some uses.

Re:um okay

[cryptizard]

Also, to clarify, I meant if you were in a certain location say in a large park. Like if you want to meet someone in central park somewhere and they are not familiar with the area.

Re:um okay

[cryptizard]

Yes of course I realize that, but they might as well be to an average person.

Re:um okay

[cbiltcliffe]

Did you read the GP? Considering that mangled sentence construction and misspellings, I'm not sure English words are easier to remember.

Especially if you're not a native English speaker, which I'm guessing the GP isn't.

Re:um okay

[BasilBrush]

Not a significant problem. It's localised into the major languages. If you're French, you get 3 French words. And of course if you are using the English version, typing the french 3 words in will still work.

But the number of times you want to communicate a non-address location to someone who doesn't speak the same language are few and far between anyway.

Re:um okay

[BasilBrush]

It'd be extremely useful for one of those music festivals where there are acres of camping. A 3m square is perfect for giving an address of your tent to your friends.

Re:um okay

[NatasRevol]

Unless those words are for some random place that make no sense.

Example:
w3w.cm/embrace.extend.extinguish

It's already basically useless because there was no limitations on word usage.

http://what3words.com/eat.horse.shit

Re:um okay

[Kjella]

Give it a try. Go around and pick places and see if you find words you don't know. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I tried for a while and I didn't come up with any.

Didn't take me very long, do you know what "festoons", "muslin" or "almsgiving" is? Not off the top of my hat, now I'm not a native English speaker but I've watched movies and TV without dubbing or subtitles for many years, I've read many English books and generally consider me all but fluent in English yet all of these have eluded me. Here's a sample with all three.

Re:um okay

[mcmonkey]

Have you not realized that three english words are easier to remember than 12-20 random numbers?

What does that have to do with this disucssion?

In this case, it's the 3 words that are random, vs. (at most) 4 groups of 3 numbers (123.456, 123.456) that's aren't random at all.

The words may be easier to remember, but so what? I can quickly tell you 49.43N, 120.57W is close to 49.43N, 120.43W. How far is "purple.monkey.dishwasher" from "straight.cash.homey"?

Re:um okay

[oobayly]

I really don't want you to be right, but you are. I suppose it's not worth pointing out that given two sets of 3 words, it's completely and unequivocally impossible to gauge the distance between them, because the average person probably won't even be able to tell you which hemisphere those "random" numbers are in, so where's the loss.

Re:um okay

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't realized that at all. 3 random words vs 12-20 random numbers...still takes the same amount of space or *gasp* EVEN MORE SPACE!

Maybe if people were coming up with 3 words like: Sesame Street: Where Muppets Live.
But they aren't. They are coming up with random shit that I will not remember in 5 minutes. At least the numbers make sense on a grid and can be guessed at. The words...oh these words. They don't make sense and aren't unique.

Re:um okay

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be extremely useful for one of those music festivals where there are acres of camping. A 3m square is perfect for giving an address of your tent to your friends.

Going to a death metal festival and having to tell your friends you're at "justin.bieber.camp" is perfect?

Re:um okay

[Chrisq]

Give it a try. Go around and pick places and see if you find words you don't know. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I tried for a while and I didn't come up with any.

Didn't take me very long, do you know what "festoons", "muslin" or "almsgiving" is?.

Sad to say yes

Re:um okay

[Chris Mattern]

Didn't take me very long, do you know what "festoons", "muslin" or "almsgiving" is?

festoons: drapes over, especially in a festive or decorative fashion.

muslin: a type of fabric (cotton, I believe)

almsgiving: the act of giving money as charity, particularly in a religious context

Re:um okay

[kermidge]

I have the advantage of English as milk tongue, but even so, I'd met all three of those words more than fifty years ago and it didn't take all that much reading to do so, maybe a few hundred books.

Interesting idea, but a silly scam nonetheless. The four-word mapping from Lat/Long above makes more sense, yet it's still as silly and only about as useful as vanity plates on one's auto.

Re:um okay

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I'll bite.

I calculate that you would need 29 unique words (3^29 = ~69 trillion). Where the heck did you get 38000?

Re:um okay

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, that would be for a string of twenty-nine words where each word had three possibilities, not the other way around...

I'll give it a try.

[Anonymous Coward]

honorificabilitudinitatibus.pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism.discordianism

another.useless.service

[mveloso]

why.not.another
cheese.ball.central
i.hate.periods
t.l.a

Re:another.useless.service

[fizzup]

I dunno. I'm having some fun with it: "another.useless.service" is on Outtrim Avenue in the southern suburbs of Canberra, Australia.

Re:another.useless.service

[Anonymous Coward]

I win the internet today:

Apparently there's a place called MINGE with the w3w address: womenfolk.aggravated.comforting

Re:another.useless.service

[Anonymous Coward]

burma.shave.

Re:another.useless.service

[Megane]

1999.has.returned
dot.com.bust
drkoop.flooz.webvan
cuecat.didnt.work
wasted.venture.capital

Re:another.useless.service

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno. I'm having some fun with it: "another.useless.service" is on Outtrim Avenue in the southern suburbs of Canberra, Australia.

Hey that's my business address, mate!

Re:another.useless.service

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, how about stupidest.idea.ever for what3words, London, England?

How about New.York.City for New York City?

Or, how about this one: Minneapolis.Saint.Paul for Minneapolis-St.Paul?

Re:another.useless.service

[GumphMaster]

Apparently the don't reinvent.the.wheel despite.all.appearances. I find it a totally.pointless.service but I am sure sure.somebody.will think this is the best thing since purple.monkey.dishwasher and not totally *pointless.

easy

[Anonymous Coward]

slashdot sucks dick

Screeching monkeys ...

[gstoddart]

And people will immediately start injecting their beliefs into it, and it will devolve into competing sides trying to "define" a specific thing.

So if I say "fetid.corrupt.assholes" for Washington DC, and someone says "freedom.defenders.awesome", those two aren't reconcilable.

This is just a chance for everyone to try to shout loudest to assign their own description of something.

It's a "big.pointless.exercise".

Re:Screeching monkeys ...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The words are pre-filled for all locations, apparently arbitrarily(with respect to their natural-language meanings), I assume that they used some cute math trick, maybe a hash of some flavor to munge (latitude, longitude) into a unique triplet selected from the dictionary, rather than assigning them fully randomly and having to store the whole collection, rather than being able to re-generate as needed; but they don't say.

Of course, for a low annual fee, you can buy a shorter 'Oneword'(tm) to advertise your place of business or whatever, so maybe somebody will give a damn about those...

Re:Screeching monkeys ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your.Mom.Ma

Re:Screeching monkeys ...

[gstoddart]

Your.Mom.Ma

No, you're doing it wrong ... your.momma.fat, your.momma.ugly, your.momma.whore ... you wasted one of your words.

Sheesh, amateurs. ;-)

Re:Screeching monkeys ...

[fizzup]

Closest I could come: http://what3words.com/aged.loose.mother

Re:Screeching monkeys ...

[gstoddart]

Closest I could come: http://what3words.com/aged.loose.mother

Hmmm, without following the link, I'm guessing either Octomom or Joan Rivers. ;-)

Re:Screeching monkeys ...

[aBaldrich]

The seat of my country's government has inifinite* triplets. The same location is: Booster.correct.direct, drove.flips.packing, changing.dubbing.lump, cakes.formally.snores. reviewed.strides.slug, marriage.moved.poker, activity.resist.glad, quieter.alien.result, mother.tablet.powerful, etc.

Washington DC

[Sparticus789]

Corrupt Incompetent Assclowns

Or CIA.

Re:washington DC

[CanHasDIY]

How about bloviating.moron.central?

Tried it

[ardmhacha]

load.of.bollocks

Search

We couldn't find any results for load.of.bollocks

Re:Tried it

[xaxa]

We couldn't find any results for load.of.bollocks

They seem to have removed anything that could be rude in any way (e.g. 'balls').

http://what3words.com/many.many.spheres -- Argentina, near Uruguay.

it's a startup so is it gonna cost?

[gl4ss]

like 1 million pixels but with earth?

Give. Your. Money.

[Picass0]

TFA fails to mention you have to pay to assign words to a location.

Re:Give. Your. Money.

[cryptizard]

Okay, that kind of ruins it. Important information I wish we would have had.

Re:Give. Your. Money.

[Endovior]

Kinda sorta. All possible locations already have random words... if you want to change those words to some other word, they charge money for that. Probably not worth it, obviously; anyone doing so now is essentially speculating on the expansion of the system... like trying to buy up common domain names on a newly-opened TLD in order to sell it off later and/or benefit from hypothetical traffic to come once people start using that corner of the net.

Re:Give. Your. Money.

[HairyNevus]

Yeah, I skipped the article (...) and went straight to the site looking to see what my hometown and block I live in would be called. Very confused and alarmed at why my neighborhood had 'tigers' as one of the words, then I figured out what the site was all about. At least I don't have to worry about those goddamn tigers.

Re:Give. Your. Money.

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA fails to mention you have to pay to assign words to a location.

Nobody told them the missing step - ???- is IPO?

Getting users is easy. Selling stuff to users is tough. But once gotten, the users are easily sold.

washington DC

[slugstone]

Mordor

Oh that one word.

822 S Robertson Blvd #350 Los Angeles, CA 90035 Un

[Anonymous Coward]

celebrities . diseased . junk

Yay indexing

[UneducatedSixpack]

This could be hot for a while. Knowing that people liked planking, rickrolling and other crap this location naming could keep idiots busy for a while :)

Re:Yay indexing

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

insert.meme.here

Re:Yay indexing

[Anonymous Coward]

totally.lost.somewhere

Damn. Too many words.

[AliasMarlowe]

Sometimes, plain coordinates or a normal address would be better. Our house is on just over a hectare of land. That's about 1000 of those damn word triplets; even a fast talker would go blue in the face saying them. Our cottage is on 6½ hectares - a whole chorus would be left breathless.

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

San Francisco, CA: "Not United States"
Redmond, WA: "Hell On Earth"

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed the 3m x 3m thing - perhaps because it wasn't in feet or yards. But since you started it... My place can be described as "armpit.of.california".

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Stockton?

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fresno

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[ackthpt]

Stockton?

No, that's the crotch of California. The Armpit is Oakland.

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That's about 1000 of those damn word triplets

That means you have a lot of them to choose from, pick one and stick with it. I'm sure yours will be at least as funny as mine.

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stockton?

No, that's the crotch of California. The Armpit is Oakland.

Los Angeles is the asshole.

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Moryath]

Texas = Shitty Christian Taliban.

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Anonymous Coward]

New York: Filthy Shit Hole

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Idimmu Xul]

That's about 1000 of those damn word triplets;

too much choice

?

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's the crotch of California. The Armpit is Oakland.

Every Californian knows that Fresno is the true armpit.

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

But Oakland has some real redemptive bright-spots, to accompany the blight.

Used to live off of 32nd near MLK, way in the day.

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[scuzzlebutt]

Shouldn't there be two armpits? No need to quibble.

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[Quila]

Berkeley: Loopy Looney Land

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[DerekLyons]

I was about to say the same thing - what exactly is the point of having 82 different (and seemingly totally randomly) named points in my backyard?

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[russbutton]

What? Haven't you ever been to Bakersfield?

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[MickLinux]

Actually, 5 words would be a lot better. For a 3x3 area, there are about .4E15 locations, so 3 words makes you need to use a major part of our common dictionary. Thus, the words have nothing in common with the location. But you could possibly use 420 words for the first level, and so on. Thus oceans would be water, wet, salty, wave, iceberg, albatross, and so on. Deserts would be dry, salt, radiant, and so on. states could be their own name; so could countries.

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[adamofgreyskull]

I suppose it is a solution to their (perhaps contrived) example:

"...the 'what3words' for the famous Peter Pan statue in London's Hyde Park is 'union.prop.enjoy'."

If your friend wants to meet you in Hyde Park (it's a big place) and you don't know where the statue of Peter Pan is, he can say "union.prop.enjoy" and w3w can guide you there...

Of course, since both of you would have to have smartphones for this to work, quite why a long/lat wouldn't also work is beyond me...especially given the prospect of missed encounters between young lovers: "Sorry, I thought you said 'onion.pope.enjoy'!!"

Re: Damn. Too many words.

[ti-85]

Los Angeles, CA: "Edge of planet"

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[steveb3210]

Perhaps it needs more structure? e.g. a 10mx10m region shares the same two words and then the third word acts as a reference into that array of 100 points...

Re:Damn. Too many words.

[RockDoctor]

Our house is on just over a hectare of land. That's about 1000 of those damn word triplets; even a fast talker would go blue in the face saying them.

Define the corner points (if rectilinear) : 12 words. If circular (unlikely, because they don't tile a plane), one tuple of words and a radius. For the most complex regular polygon that does tile the plane, the hexagon, 6 vertices for 18 tuples (this would also suffice for a rectangle that has a missing rectangle, an "ell" shape). Which is still hardly a severe problem.

A lat-long pair in decimal degrees to similar precision ... would be I think 18 significant decimal digits which (since you'd know how many digits you need for the whole number of degrees) I think you'd need about a 64-bit word. Might need a transform to keep everything in positive numbers, such as expressing things north and east from the South Pole ; otherwise you'd need to assign a couple of sign bits.

I'll have to go and RTFA now to find out how they come up with their tuples.

Personally, having to routinely track oil well positions to the millimetre, across multiple kilometres in both plan and elevation, I wonder what the point of this would be. I'm perfectly comfortable using UTM coordinates in any of 120 zones and to 3 decimal places. And I really should get round to writing that conversion routine from local coordinates to UTMs, because you do have to take into account the non-sphericity of the geoid. Ugly maths!

Obviously...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uni.Matrix.Zero

GPS coordinates?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why aren't GPS coordinates used? And why doesn't the word combination even make sense?

Good Grief

[cryptizard]

Queue all the people complaining about how this is stupid and they will never use it. News flash: just because something isn't useful to you doesn't mean it has no value. There are lots of people in the world and, believe it or not, most of them are not you. If you can't think of how this could be useful, you are either stupid or being deliberately obtuse.

Re:Good Grief

[i kan reed]

See, but the thing is, it provides no unique utility. Semantic, searchable map: already done better by Google maps. Highly specific location identifier: already done better by geocoordinates. Human memorable name for location, already done better with street names and city. There's no unique role to fill here.

Re:Good Grief

[iggymanz]

but most of those people would have no use for english words. someone is being obtuse all right....

Re:Good Grief

[cryptizard]

Places in the country don't have street addresses. Places in large parks don't have street addresses. Places on the beach don't have street addresses. Anywhere that's not a building doesn't have a street address.

Re:Good Grief

[cryptizard]

No, you are being obtuse if you don't think they can implement this in more than one language. That is just fucking retarded to think there is some special significance to English here. The point of it is that you can succinctly communicate locations to people that you are already communicating in, presumably in a language that you share.

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Enlighten us, oh wise one.

Re:Good Grief

[cryptizard]

It's like a generalization of street addresses. Lots of places (anywhere that's not a building) don't have street addresses, but you might want to communicate their location to someone. Now you just find it on the map and you have a succinct, easily rememberable label for that place, which others can look up on the website to find. Imagine you want to meet someone in central park somewhere but they don't know the area. You find it on the map, give them the three words, and they know right where you are talking about. You could use latitude/longitude, but that is harder to remember and communicate over a phone/sms/email.

Re:Good Grief

[xaxa]

They already have Spanish words (click the flag).

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

The term you meant is "cue", numbnuts.

Re:Good Grief

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There's one drawback: It would be quite easy for this service to give you a list of identifiers in a close vicinity of the marked spot, not just the marked spot itself. I've just checked about twenty identifiers for my house. Some are more memorable than others. Why not make it easier to find them?

Re:Good Grief

[cryptizard]

That is true. My bad.

Re:Good Grief

[iggymanz]

Wonderful, we'll only need 4,500 systems for each of the langauges in the world with more than 1,000 speakers.

or we could use an international standard system that exists already and is readily usable by the world's more than 6 billion mobile devices.

Re:Good Grief

[cbiltcliffe]

You obviously haven't been out in the country anywhere around where I live.
Every house has a street address. Some barns have street addresses. Heck, I've even seen empty fields with street addresses.

Now, you're right, that it doesn't narrow it down anywhere near as much as this, because the lot at 1748 Hillbilly Road might be somewhere around 100 acres, rather than 9 square meters. Get in the center of that lot, though, and you'll probably be within shouting distance of whoever you're trying to find in it, unless it's planting or harvesting season.

Re:Good Grief

[cbiltcliffe]

No, he meant all the people are going to be lining up to complain. Hence, queue.

(Yes, I'm kidding.)

Re:Good Grief

[Anonymous Coward]

but most of those people would have no use for english words.

None of the important ones do. I don't often share coordinates with Chinese monoglots.

Re:Good Grief

[swillden]

+1

I'd like to see the grid overlaid on the map, with the labels in each box. Then I could easily pick the most memorable of the phrases.

one better

[lactose99]

I'll describe the entire Earth in only 2:

Mostly Harmless

Re:one better

[FreeUser]

I'll describe the entire Earth in only 2:

Mostly Harmless

I'll describe it in one:

shit

Re:one better

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just part of it. I'll describe the rest of it in 2 as well:

my.property

Re:one better

[Anonymous Coward]

future.hyperspatial.expressway

why.choose.english

[Monoman]

why.choose.english

Is it safe to assume that is it universally acceptable to use three random English words?

Re:why.choose.english

[Anonymous Coward]

why.choose.english

English is the lingua franca of our species, at the moment.

You knew that. You just don't like it.

Re:why.choose.english

[Pseudonym Authority]

Probably because the developers spoke English. Grow up, not everything is cultural imperialism. Maybe when you graduate college you'll be able to ask less idiotic questions.

Re:why.choose.english

[Monoman]

Well at least you made me laugh.

three ENGLISH words

[iggymanz]

English is in decline, better choose a language used by a greater percentage of the earth's population. Mandarin and Spanish have more native speakers, perhaps we should use one of those.

Re:three ENGLISH words

[Anonymous Coward]

English is the still the language of choice as a second language and is still the language of computers and the internet. No sign of that changing anytime soon.

english.still.rules

deal.with.english

take.that.sucka

Re:three ENGLISH words

[xaxa]

They already have Spanish: http://what3words.com/ducha.cheque.pileta

Re:three ENGLISH words

[LordVader717]

With the rise of the internet English has been on a surge. There is absolutely no indication that it's about to be overtaken by Spanish or -gasp- Mandarin, which is considered impenetrable by most the world's population.

Re:three ENGLISH words

[iggymanz]

No, Engish is in decline. 1.0 billion total speakers (native and non-native) in world, has fallen to second place behind Standard Chinese speakers 1.2 billion.

Re:three ENGLISH words

[LordVader717]

The decimal points imply you know it with kind of accuracy, where in fact nobody does. 1 Billion is definitely on the low end of estimates. A 10 year old study puts the number of L2 speakers at 1.5 Billion, and some higher estimates think the number is over 2 Billion.

The low estimates tend to rely on old statistics and look at stuff like population growth, which ignores the effect of cultural influences like the internet. For comparison the number of internet users has more than quadrupled since 2003, a time when most connections were also too slow for video. Of course a lot of this growth is from China though.

The way you worded your post implies that English was recently ahead of Chinese. I don't know if that was the case. But one thing most experts agree on is that English is rapidly growing

Yet another geographic coord system???

[davidwr]

See also: Category:Geographic coordinate systems.

Re:Yet another geographic coord system???

[jfengel]

This one has the advantage of being an Internet Startup, which can be breathlessly blogged about until some big corporation with too much cash on hand buys out its original investors for many times the actual revenue stream. Can the Hellenic Geodetic Reference System claim that?

Beijing, China

[PPH]

"massing.ensemble.alters"

Latin characters? Really?

Thereis an APP for that

[DadLeopard]

Of course the whole thing is, you won't be able to find anything without their APP! Only for those that can not wrap their heads around the concept of Latitude and Longitude, which by the way, can get you a lot closer than a 3x3 meter square!

Re:Thereis an APP for that

[Pseudonym Authority]

I bet that you can't navigate with only latitude and longitude (not proper nouns, by the way), without electronics either.

which by the way, can get you a lot closer than a 3x3 meter square!

I don't think it's for giving the directions to needles in haystacks. The resolution is plenty accurate for almost everything; if you need more accuracy to point out a location, you're doing something wrong.

salt.lake.city -- St. Louis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I doing this right? Searching for salt.lake.city gives a location in St. Louis, MO. I know what's going on, but possibly confusing...

funny

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder where would be "come.here.fuck"? :D

What is correct?

[Minwee]

Horse, battery, staple.

Re:What is correct?

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct!

Re:What is correct?

[jfdavis668]

I've got the same combination on my luggage!

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

This concept is: dumb.as.fuck

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding! its.completely.worthless

Piece.of.shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder where something like Piece.of.shit be? :)

Cleveland Ohio

[Anonymous Coward]

Cleveland Ohio factory.of.sadness

Atlanta, GA

[Anonymous Coward]

guns.moonshine.bandwidth

Re:Atlanta, GA

[cbiltcliffe]

That's probably pretty accurate, wouldn't you say? :)

one.crazy.b****

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

and how about

[toshikodo]

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch, oh wait that's only one word.

Re:and how about

[gstoddart]

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch

Welsh, I assume? ;-)

I kid, I kid.

Re:and how about

[Anonymous Coward]

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch

Welsh, I assume? ;-)

Yes.

I kid, I kid.

I'm not.

Right Here

[BobNET]

middle.of.nowhere

come.here.fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder where would be "come.here.fuck" or "get.fucked.here"? :D
I searched but no results :P

Re:come.here.fuck

[Pseudonym Authority]

It's even more disappointing when you find that there is no here.be.dragons . I'll never find a dragon. ;_;

3m x 3m area of the oval office

[Anonymous Coward]

stupid.fucking.douchebag

3 Words? I can do it in 2...

[Rob_Bryerton]

Three words seems a bit excessive when it can be easily done with two words.

Earth's A$$hole = New Jersey

Thanks! I'll be here all week...

Obsolete by prior art

[chuckinator]

Lattitude, longitude, altitude above ground level.

33.755, -84.39, 0 in my case.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[Anonymous Coward]

Lattitude, longitude, altitude above ground level.

33.755, -84.39, 0 in my case.

0 feet AGL, huh. You are lying down, I take it? Or maybe an Asiana pilot, comfortable rounding on unimportant details.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[cryptizard]

But you have to go out to 4 decimal places to get the accuracy that they are getting and it's a lot easier to remember words than it is to remember 12-18 numbers.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[chuckinator]

I'm counting the lowest position of my physical body, so that's the AGL of the soles of my feet. I'm just under 2 meters tall, and that's within error tolerance of most geospatial coordinate systems.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[chuckinator]

The article says that they use a reference grid of 3x3 squares. That's 0 decimal place accuracy. 4 decimal place accuracy using meters is 0.1 millimeter accuracy.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[cryptizard]

No, I mean that is how many decimal places you have to go in latitude/longitude to get 3 meter accuracy.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[Anonymous Coward]

Circumference earth = 40M meters, divide by two for east/west, north/south, divide by 3 for 3x3 meter chunks:

roughly 7 significant figures.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[cryptizard]

I said that. I said four decimal places, and there are 3 decimals for degrees in front of that.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[chuckinator]

IEEE754 32-bit floating point has been able to handle that level of accuracy without too many problems since the standard was published in 1985, but you can continue arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin all you'd like.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[tftp]

Nobody needs to remember coordinates. I'm using GPS for navigation, and I enter coordinates very rarely - and when I do, it's a copy/paste from Google Maps.

Numerical coordinates have one huge advantage: they can be put into a formula, and that can be done on any tiny portable device that is offline. A database requires an online connection.

Most people use street numbers instead of coordinates or those word triplets. The street numbers have their own advantage: they are generally regular, and if you are at 1200 Main St. you can generally tell where 300 Main St. should be, and how far. Streets require databases, but those are already programmed into navigation GPS devices - and we aren't going to abandon street numbers any time soon.

As others said, this is just yet another useless service that tries to sell us words from the dictionary.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[cryptizard]

I don't even understand what we're arguing about any more. I was saying that it is a lot of digits for someone to remember in their head, which has nothing to do with IEEE anything.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[cryptizard]

It's a big leap from "I won't use this service" to "this service is useless". Think of it like DNS for every 3x3m square on the earth.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[tftp]

But what is this service good for? If not for much, it makes it useless. The same happens if enough people refuse to use it.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[Anonymous Coward]

it is easier to remember one set of 3 words maybe. If you have few of them it starts being difficult and for few dozens it makes no sense to remember them so you store them in your 'phone'. Maybe as an id in said 'phone' this would do not sure.

Re:Obsolete by prior art

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like the same amount of characters. Unless they used huge words, then the words take up more space.
Not to mention, if people are paying for this service then they are putting their own 3 words to each place they want to remember. Now everybody has a different name for everything. You can't fuck up coordinates that bad.

Creepy.Ass.Cracka

[Anonymous Coward]

(or Creepy.Ass.Cracker if the other is taken)

Slashdot....

[rullywowr]

Slashdot
nobody.reads.TFA

Re:Slashdot....

[killmofasta]

Mod.parent.+1.funny.

My three words?
Endless stretch ocean.
Accounts for about at least 1.6 ~ 1.8 trillion of these squares.

Re:Slashdot....

[ByteSlicer]

Slashdot
nobody.reads.TFA

news.for.nerds
(or maybe that was too obvious?)

All locations with same 3 words

[Anonymous Coward]

Human.Infested.Planet

Or, for our friends listening in via PRISM.

[RobertNotBob]

No Such Agency. @ 39.109, -76.746

A somewhat better idea...

[Dzimas]

While every square on the grid can be identified by three words, wouldn't it make sense to use a single word to describe coordinates of a few thousand key high traffic locations? After all, being able to geolocate to part of a field in Wyoming has considerably less value than a identifying the entrance of an art gallery, restaurant or popular landmark in a major city. Heck, make them meaningful, too. "Trafalgar" could geolocate the centre of the fountain in Trafalgar square (an admittedly stupid place) while "Trafalgar.north" could place you X meters north of the coordinates.

Re:A somewhat better idea...

[cryptizard]

Yes, I believe they have single word addresses for popular places.

Re:A somewhat better idea...

[gl4ss]

well here's an idea, buy a name from them as TheTrafalgarNorth

I don't think they'll give a crap about what you type into your three words to be as long as the combination is unique, as a consequence you could buy a place called moneygrabdouchenbergensteinmyanmar.

what they offer is.. buy words in a db and attach them to a position in said db.

Re:A somewhat better idea...

[Dzimas]

We have precious few, actually. Especially ones that are georeferenced to a specific coordinate. Shortcuts like Trafalgar, Eiffel, Empire, Chrysler would be useful but aren't unique in common language (Empire Theater? Empire State Building?). Hell, add a couple of numbers behind them as an offset in meters - Eiffel (23,15). It just seems that there's a much smarter way to use meaningful abbreviations than fishmonger.cephalopoda.drain.

How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

lousy.stinking.cubicle

itsa.smallworld.afterall...

[russbutton]

itsa.smallworld.afterall...

Cold Overcast Crowded

[ackthpt]

Why crowded? Because it's Summer and temperatures are in 3 digits (F) inland.

burn-harvest-rice

[Anonymous Coward]

add monkey ... but that's racist and true.

Craggy Island?

[Anonymous Coward]

Drink.Feck.Arse

Already have one

[Anonymous Coward]

They already have a 3 word name for my neck of the woods: Butt fuck nowhere.

Interesting concept

[bkr1_2k]

Considering mailing addresses in some places are essentially landmark references rather than proper street addresses, this might actually be a useful tool if there weren't any GPS.

My address in South Korea, for example, was "pumpkin patch" and the town I lived in, with the house number. My street name was never once listed on my mail. For anyone other than the mailman, finding my house based upon my mailing address was a nightmare. I had to give specific directions from known locations. (Obviously the house I lived in was no longer a pumpkin patch.)

With the proliferation of GPS enabled devices, though, probably not particularly helpful.

Continuity

[seyyah]

I'm sitting at beach.country.pineapple and my co-worker is at closing.rheumatoid.begin. How does that help someone find out if he's 6 feet away or 6000 miles away?

And how do you spell "rheumatoid" again?

Re:Continuity

[sootman]

It's completely useless unless you are connected to and can do lookups in a gigantic database. So in other words, it's completely useless. So what if it's easier to remember and say than, say, lat/lon coordinates -- lat/lon has a dozen other advantages. If you need to refer to a place by name to someone, agree on a meaningful name. "Use this prebuilt list of a trillion random names" is pretty dumb.

Re:Continuity

[Anonymous Coward]

It helps by going to their map and searching for those words to see where they are.

Re:Continuity

[d'baba]

That's 'Roomatoid', which my private dictionary defines as: any cleaning/service bot tied to a particular place.

Re:Continuity

[Kjella]

I'm sitting at beach.country.pineapple and my co-worker is at closing.rheumatoid.begin. How does that help someone find out if he's 6 feet away or 6000 miles away?

Maybe that's a feature, not a bug? As it is, on a website it sounds stupid. But if this was built into a GPS device and you'd say "beach.country.pineapple" over any kind of voice line like landline, cell phone, radio - particularly relaying where it's not your phone's current GPS location - it'd be very hard to fumble saying/hearing/writing down numbers and end up with anyone thinking you're somewhere else. Say if some shit happened outside the coverage area and someone had to walk back and call in help to "beach.country.pineapple". And if you did say a wrong word, chances are the answer would be so horribly wrong it's obvious. Compare that to being on 40.87 or 40.78 degrees north, both can seem like a "reasonable" value inside a search area. It'd be a shame if that rescue party went to the wrong place while you were bleeding out or freezing to death.

On the other hand you could probably do this simpler and better with a basic checksum and one or two control digits, because you also lose the instant "they're northwest of here, move out" until you've looked up and deciphered the code and typing it in on a GPS unit in the field would waste valuable time. Either way, it doesn't really have much benefit unless it was universally accepted as an alternate form of GPS coordinates, so I don't see this going anywhere. If you need to be connected to the Internet to translate the coordinates into a code for the person receiving the code to look it back up on the Internet then there are a zillion better ways of transmitting the same information.

Re:Continuity

[cdrudge]

I'm sitting at beach.country.pineapple and my co-worker is at closing.rheumatoid.begin. How does that help someone find out if he's 6 feet away or 6000 miles away?

How does knowing that you're in zip code 38106 while your friend is in 72301 help you out? Are you 6 feet away or 6000 miles? Those are zip codes in the greater Memphis area, on in Tennessee and the other across the Mississippi River in Arkansas. You sometimes can tell relative vicinity based on the sectional center facility id (the first 3 digits) but beyond that you really can't tell any type of accurate locations without looking up where exactly the zip code is at...just like this system.

Re:Continuity

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at their map, their word combinations are completely random.

And how to they ever expect to use this for the ocean, or untamed forest/jungle?

Maybe amazon.trees.jaguars will be next to amazon.trees.snakes, but that's going to run out fairly quickly. And once you've used up north.atlantic.waves, what will you use for the rest of it?

I have a three word code for their project: three.word.gimmick

Re:Continuity

[mcmonkey]

I'm sitting at beach.country.pineapple and my co-worker is at closing.rheumatoid.begin. How does that help someone find out if he's 6 feet away or 6000 miles away?

And that's why this is a lame idea. Several comments compare it to the DNS system. Well, with DNS, the user generally does not care where 2 devices are in relation to each other. With geographical location, relation between 2 points (usually where I am and where I want to go) is VERY important.

So they've reduced the signal to a form easier to communicate and remember (compared to long. and lat. coordinates), but removed all usefull information in the process.

Re:Continuity

[Threni]

Why are Zip codes so lame? In the UK we have post codes, which are generally of the form:

XXN NXX

ie

LN2 3JN

and describe a small range of addresses. You can generally uniquely identify an address with just the house number and the postcode. What is the point of a Zip code, and not add the extra character and make it really useful?

Re:Continuity

[HornWumpus]

We have longer zip codes. Only computers use them. I don't know my own house's long zip code.

Of course ours have to be longer. England is 50,346 Square miles, California is 163,696, Texas is 268,820, Alaska is 663,300.

Re:Continuity

[pz]

I'm sitting at beach.country.pineapple and my co-worker is at closing.rheumatoid.begin.

Yeah, they should have implemented a more continuous system such that if, for example, two addresses had no words in common, they'd be quite distant, one word, within a large region, two words, a small region. Then, on top of that, put in alphabetic sorting so that elephant.reciprocity.meander is pretty close to elephant.reciprocity.nominate and really close to elephant.recapitulate.meander.

Double plus good if they had made the three words subject-verb-object sentences (but maybe there aren't enough English words for that).

While the current approach is an unfortunate miss from the human usability aspect, at least they managed to put short descriptors in urban areas, leaving longer ones for the middle of big bodies of water.

Re:Continuity

[Anonymous Coward]

*WARNING* incorrect assumption

You assume postcodes (zipcodes) are based on area. They are in fact based on occupied residencies (or business addresses), and as such given the UK has more than double the population of California they probably need a lot more post codes.

(this obviously applies to Texas, and absolutely applies to, Alaska which is basically a huge frozen wasteland.)

How will xkcd update geo-hashing for w3w?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/Main_Page

Soundalikes...

[Zontar The Mindless]

...could provide a few special moments.

Stockholm Central

Route 4, near Rutland VT, USA

In the South Atlantic, about 250 km off the coast of Argentina

Re:Soundalikes...

[martyb]

Homophones were my first thought as well, especially given how many times I've seen misuses of:

• their, there, they're
• to, too (and two)
• than, then
• your, you're

For more words, see: multinyms. Therein are differently-spelled yet similarly-sounding words in groups of triplets up to and including septuplets!

Here are some potentially troublesome examples that came to mind; please reply with more!

• you.are.here
• yew.our.hear
• have.whey.their
• marry.merry.Mary
• hale.seas.are
• tolled.inn.vane
• knot.holy.rued
• won.hilt.wander

As a concept for monetizing something they don't even own, I think it's absolutely brilliant. I remember when "pet rocks" were all the rage, and then the "blank on board" signs. As a novelty item, they'll probably make a fortune. Of course, the natural name for their sequel would be: four.words.too.

Claxton, Georgia

[Jewfro_Macabbi]

Rednecks, fruitcakes, rattlesnakes

armpit.of.california

[roc97007]

Fresno.

Missed a money-making opportunity -- bidding

[WillAdams]

They could've made quite a bit of money by announcing this concept first, using placeholder names, then auctioning off various word combinations, or allowing people to pay to assign certain word combinations to coordinates.

Good Idea.... End of GPS coordinates

[Tim12s]

Who said a yellow cat with a pink ribbon would sell millions? Social but only 140 characters and one sentence.....

trust.fund.kid

[roc97007]

Portland, OR

3 words

[Ukab the Great]

Location, location, location.

Re:3 words

[Z00L00K]

And where I live: Detroit.of.Sweden

I think it's a neat idea, but no semantics

[fizzup]

Without meaning, it's hard to ever find a place. The obvious way to use it is to find a memorable 3x3 spot near where you want to record. However, similar names are a long way apart. For example, fired.hotel.resident is in Papua, New Guinea; however, the semantically similar fired.hotel.dweller is in Germany.

Without similar names referring to similar places, like country.region.city.street.house does naturally, the service is not that helpful. Even if you had more words to remember, it would be better to have a hierarchical representation of places so that nearby names referred to nearby places.

Obligatory ST-TNG Reference

[Palmateer]

Darmok.Jalad.Tanagra

Re:Obligatory ST-TNG Reference

[ArcadeMan]

Shaka walls fell?

Re:Obligatory ST-TNG Reference

[Anonymous Coward]

His eyes uncovered!

This is truly stupid.

[XB-70]

Apart from the fact that, at the very basis of the concept, non latin alphabet words pose a problem, there is no relevance whatsoever to the words used.

That said, I live at:

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.Antidisestablishmentarianism

which also proves that the concept has no merit.

Three words for the startup what3words

[paiute]

stupid.fucking.idea

or more accurately:

google.please.buyus

Adblock

[Zawahiri]

This is a pretty good commercial.

Caerphilly, South Wales

[GarethIwanFairclough]

"What", "A", "Shithole". That count?

You saind ANY place, right?

[tristes_tigres]

"NSA spies on it"

Compuserve HQ

[Deadstick]

house.star.magnet.

Kansas

[ThatsNotPudding]

Ignorant, Fearful, White.

These

[Anonymous Coward]

Boring. Fucking. Shithole.

longitude.latitude.twonumberssuffice

[Anonymous Coward]

:)

HHGTG

[rossdee]

Mostly Harmless

thats only two words howevere

Into Darkness did it better

[Okian Warrior]

Star Trek Into Darkness did it better.

In that movie, a set of four 2-digit transporter coordinates has enough resolution to distinguish a location on a planet in another solar system from a moon of Jupiter.

(Also, using a transporter the size of a duffel bag (including power source), you can transport someone from Earth to Kronos. Never mind that the planet is light years away, Earth and Kronos are spinning on their axis, both planets are going around their respective suns, both systems are traveling through space in different directions, and you're doing this from a seated position in a damaged ship whirling out of control. Also, the transport is instantaneous - it goes at warp speed without a ship!)

(Oh, and let's hide the ship underwater, even though the indigenous population wouldn't be able to see us if we stayed in orbit.)

Sell the words.

[QuasiSteve]

[How would you know what location word1 word word 3 is?] Through the website obviously. That is their service.

I suspect other aspects of that service would be charging for access (especially mobile apps) and, assuming it proves popular, selling word combinations to companies that would prefer their own vanity word combinations and are more than willing to pay for it.

I do think the idea is neat, but between either specifying the location where it can easily be found in the first place, and just sending the location data in a text / IM / whatever (somebody else suggested GPS coordinates, a reply there was that those are difficult to remember/convey.. but most location websites/apps simply allow you to copy a link / share the location without having to worry about the GPS coordinates at all), I'm not sure it's a service that's filling an actual need.

They're playing 1 million pixels, $1 each

[Anonymous Coward]

but they've extended the playing field. Nothing to see here, don't feed the MBAs.

Apropos

[Silvrmane]

I looked up the exact location of my office within the building I work in every day. "unlucky.sublet.deciding"

I got it

[Anonymous Coward]

what3words. is. stupid.

.hack

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.hack_%28video_game_series%29 "A three-word password system controls the characteristics of each area; attributes such as the prevalence of monsters or items change depending on the properties of each word in the password phrase."

Nice scam.

[Lumpy]

This will be as popular as the "internet ticks" crap that Swatch tried to sell to everyone.

My sexless bedroom

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I'm a technical writer. Why do you ask?

Nice Gimmick.

[Bill_the_Engineer]

If you wanted a grid system that didn't rely on a single index, you could use MGRS. Of course, 'union.prop.enjoy' for Hyde park sounds cooler than MGRS coordinate 30UXC9656810039

GPS and GSM handle that...

[Anonymous Coward]

GPS and GSM can remember and send the (lat, long) pair from your smartphone. If you want me to find where you are, then ask GPS and let the device send the coordinates to my device. That's what computers do best, handle discrete data.

randomly selected 3 words that work

[Anonymous Coward]

http://what3words.com/super.water.park (just outside NYC, in the water)
http://what3words.com/only.look.left (in a city near lake michigan)
http://what3words.com/poly.cotton.blend (in the north atlantic)
http://what3words.com/tulip.cookie.snow (in china, northwest of shanghai)
http://what3words.com/alone.fire.friend (England, near Birmingham)
http://what3words.com/burrito.barn.yard (near the eastern edge of Ukraine)
http://what3words.com/chicken.cherry.cola (antarctica, on land near the shore of the east-west middle of the Pacific)
http://what3words.com/funny.deaf.opera (suburb of detroit)
http://what3words.com/final.fresh.zoom (near rockford, illinois -- not far from lake michigan)
http://what3words.com/nearly.taken.aback (middle of pacific ocean. nearest major land mass is hawaii)

Re:usa

[cbiltcliffe]

I'm guessing they don't include any words that are NSFW, but I find it amusing that united.states.america isn't a location in this service.

Some cleverness involved

[Anonymous Coward]

To describe 57 trillion locations with three words requires a fairly large lexicon; the cube root of 57 trillion is about 38500. Yet it seems that "likely" places (i.e., in urban areas) have descriptions with relatively short words. For example, a spot in Times Square is "hats.jumpy.ruins". But a point in the middle of the Pacific is "toneless.dialectically.worksite". Trying it in reverse, "fish.fish.fish" is in Philadelphia, but "dialectically.dialectically.dialectically" is in the Indian Ocean, although not very far from the southern tip of India.

API - Easy OneWord update needed

[EGenius007]

I can see this service being especially valuable when you're trying to meet someone at a crowded public venue. Share your OneWord with them in advance and set your phone to update your location every 5 minutes.

I think it would also be nice to use at "+PIN" operation to temporary disable a OneWord unless you specify additional information. Simply typing the *OneWord without the +PIN could display a permanent location or an error message indicating that the user is protecting their location.

simple? with a 38,000+ word dictionary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Either they don't really assign 57 trillion unique combinations, or their word dictionary has over 38,000 words in it. (The cube root of 57 trillion is just over 38485.) That seems like a lot of unique words.

MGRS

[Stiletto]

How about 1m x 1m resolution in 14 characters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system

Description for startup and my location...

[Anonymous Coward]

this.shit.sucks

Haven't yet seen an:

[DangerousDriver]

America, Fuck Yeah ? Shattered expectations.

I just use IPV6 addresses

[stox]

The reserved geographic based addresses have a resolution of 1 meter.

Any Mushroom farm

[Anonymous Coward]

Smells Like Shit

3 words

[dutchwhizzman]

Okay, to get through the post filter: Too many humans

Oh, how novel...

[ndykman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system

But, you know, we will use random combinations of three words instead of a structured id because that's better. Innovation at it's finest.

Word form collisions

[billlava]

Words are harder to remember than they'd like. Say I tell my friend to meet me at "award.tricks.fish" (an example from their page, somewhere in NYC) but he remembers "award.trick.fish". Suddenly he's buying a plane ticket to Chicago, which is all just the same, because I accidentally travelled to "awards.trick.fish" and ended up just outside London. Plurals, gerunds, past tense and other word forms that have different endings make this a really unwieldy system for conveying precise information verbally. It's easy enough electronically, but then why not just make a google maps short url link and stick it in an SMS? Problem solved...

Re:Word form collisions

[RockDoctor]

It's easy enough electronically, but then why not just make a google maps short url link and stick it in an SMS? Problem solved...

If you've got a mobile phone signal. Then again, you'd probably need that to use the app, or the website. (I automatically question the assumption that you're going to have a mobile signal, because I spend 90% of my working time outside such signals, and maybe 30% of my leisure time similarly. Comes from working at sea and walking in the mountains for leisure ; I turn my phone off when I walk up the hill, because after the first 10 miles, you're generally outside contact.)

Words are harder to remember than they'd like.

I don't disagree with you - anyone who's tried to remember passwords is likely to know where you're coming from. But is "52.511206,-0.506444" much more memorable (or transmissible with minimal errors) than my first example below. Or even better than "goo.gl/PLrV9"?

I'm sure other people have been trying to work out what their algorithm is. Probably not too complex, but I couldn't see it myself. I see your point about word forms and homophones (hmmm, I should check them, in a minute).

I tried :
initially - expect.fugitives.proof (woodland in central England)
versus - expect.fugitives.denial (lake on Victoria Island, Canadian Arctic)

They're not on either a meridian or parallel, so the mapping isn't in simple stripes ("proof" mapping into somewhere on the "expect.fugitives" meridian and "denial" somewhere else on that meridian ; or orthogonally). Meh ; to get a trillion combinations (10^12), they need a dictionary of 10^4 words, ten thousand, which isn't exactly demanding. To come up with a mapping between the two systems ... oh there are lots of ways. Not a terribly interesting problem.

Homophones ... "their" and "there" should be a good start. So ... to play : "expect.expect.expect" gives somewhere in Essex ; but any combination involving "there" fails to return anything ; similarly any combination of "expect" and "their" fails too. So, they've done at least minimal exclusion of homophones from their dictionary.

Interesting idea ; might be interesting if it flies, but some how I doubt that it will. (My singature becomes more appropriate than normal.

Clearly did some semantic analysis

[ahem]

nice.finish.last == 404

Re:Clearly did some semantic analysis

[ahem]

But you'd think that http://what3words.com/top.of.world would be something you could locate... it's also a 404

Re:Clearly did some semantic analysis

[ahem]

Ok. Wait. You'd think that they would have allocated http://what3words.com/any.three.words to somewhere. But 404.

"boring undulating ocean"

[peter303]

That should fit a good billion spots

Alternative Response: Hipster Infestation Downtown

[Anonymous Coward]

Lancaster, PA:
Horse Shit EVERYWHERE.

Pile of Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh sorry too general?

Not what I expected

[dmatos]

http://what3words.com/useless.proprietary.solution

I could have sworn this would have been at the company's head office, rather than the shores of Greenland.

Why not number triplets?

[Anonymous Coward]

x.y.z

where x,y,z are in range 0-100000

my bedroom

[MrBallistic]

your.mom's.hideaway

Where-ever you are there.you.are

[ChronoFish]

I typically find most spots on Earth

really.fucking.awesome

Standing at 14,110 feet in Colorado: Really.fucking.awesome
Sitting in a kayak watching littlenecks squirt water 5 feet into the air at sunset: Really.fucking.awesome
Snorkeling in Cairns: Really.fucking.awesome
Watching tornado clouds form: Really.fucking.awesome
Looking from the top down or bottom up of the Sears Tower: Really.fucking awesome
Mountain Biking Moab: Really.fucking.awesome

Three words? I can do it with two numbers!

[Dcnjoe60]

Name any location with three words, I can do it with two numbers: Latitude and Longitude. So for the Peter Pan stature in Kensington Gardens, it is lat/lng:55.9494,-3.2000. The other advantage of using lat/lng is that if you aren't quite there, you know what direction you need to go, whereas if you are at hippo.jumbo.pimple and are trying to get to union.prop.enjoy, which way would you go?

Sometimes newer isn't better.

been there before

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the CueCat of the 21st Century.

Six words would seem to work a lot better

[wonkey_monkey]

For instance, the 'what3words' for the famous Peter Pan statue in London's Hyde Park is 'union.prop.enjoy'

What's wrong with "peter.pan.statue.hyde.park.london"?

Re:Six words would seem to work a lot better

[steelfood]

How about just peter.pan.london? Or if you really want to get creative, peterpan.statue.london.

Re:Six words would seem to work a lot better

[H0p313ss]

Works on my Machine

Complete with streetview.

This whole thing is just a solution looking for a problem.

Re:Six words would seem to work a lot better

[Dcnjoe60]

How about just peter.pan.london? Or if you really want to get creative, peterpan.statue.london.

There are more than one Peter Pan statues in London.

Re:Six words would seem to work a lot better

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with "peter.pan.statue.hyde.park.london"?
 
Pretty much what I was thinking... or sticking to 3 words, "peter.pan.statue".

Re:Six words would seem to work a lot better

[MotorMachineMercenar]

For instance, the 'what3words' for the famous Peter Pan statue in London's Hyde Park is 'union.prop.enjoy'

What's wrong with "peter.pan.statue.hyde.park.london"?

It works great for such famous, unique places. But it is impossible to describe a bend in a random stream in Siberia with three words and have someone know which bend in which stream you're talking about - and that's what the site is for.

similar places

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the three words won't be very descriptive for most places, since most places are just like most other places.

nowhere.middle.one
nowhere.middle.two

etc.

Montreal

[ArgonautThief]

Laughing.Cow.Potholes http://www.montrealmemes.com/tag/tendrement-pauline

Number of Words Required

[Anonymous Coward]

At first glance, I thought there might not be enough English words to cover 57 trillion cases. Turns out it only requires 38,485 words - just a fraction of the English words in current use.

location.location.location

[Anonymous Coward]

baa.ram.ewe
istanbul.not.constantinople

I got a million of them!

Why not just use 6 letters

[Overzeetop]

Using upper case, lower case, and numbers - separate them into three sections with dots if needed - gives just about 57 trillion combinations.

Xx.6y.18 is a valid location identifier, and it's shorter than the old 8 chr random password generator I used to use when I had the password crazed sysadmin back in the 90s.

Ambiguous pronunciation

[AdamHaun]

I searched for Houston, TX and got drums.spark.rarely, which brings up the problem of ambiguous pronunciation -- is it drum.spark.rarely, drums.park.rarely, or drums.spark.rarely? They might need to add some more filters. Maybe check for homonyms too.

I like the idea of a shorthand for global coordinates. There are places where this could be really useful. Aren't there streets in Tokyo (and London?) with no names? Now everybody in the world has an easy-to-write* address. It would also be useful for meet-ups. A three meter square is a lot less ambiguous than a street address. And while there's no simple distance/direction calculation, there is some built-in error checking -- if you get the wrong word you'll probably get a location a long way off (c.f. lat/long typos, which can give any size error in any direction).

It would be neat if there were a way to algorithmically generate place names from GPS coordinates and get a similar scheme, but that seems unlikely.

I got a better idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Latitude, Longitude, Altitude.

Describe Any Location On Earth In 3 Words

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm Right Here.

what came to mind

[Tablizer]

what.the.fuck

what I think

[Anonymous Coward]

stupidest.idea.ever

This...

[Anonymous Coward]

.. is the stupidest thing I've heard all week. It's only Tuesday so there's plenty of time for someone to come up with something even stupider, but it'll take some work.

Christchurch, New Zealand

[Anonymous Coward]

The Shaky Isles

big.money.pit

[Anonymous Coward]

sucker.born.everyminute

invest.now.getrichquick

???.???.PROFIT!!!???

Captha.is.monthly

stupid.idea.moneymaker

[Anonymous Coward]

money.making.scheme

Sounds like

[errxn]

solution.needing.problem

Oops - I broke it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've fallen off the edge of the earth:

http://what3words.com/radioactive.humanoid.mouse

Detroit

[chris200x9]

Isn't THAT bad

not so surprised...

[zonevm]

...to find "dark under belly" just outside of Cleveland, or "arrogant indifferent leader" in Russia...

very.very.stupid

[KalvinB]

Current location systems try in some way to relate to things geographically. I know that if I see house number 5, house number 7 is close by.

How do I get from complete.nonsense.garbage to this.really.sucks ? How would I even know to use those terms to describe where I'm going? From looking at those words, how do I know the relationship between the two points? Do I need to drive, fly, walk?

A rational system has a progressive level of detail. The state tells the postal carrier what state to get something to. Once in the state, the zip code tells them what post office to get to. Once at the post office, the street tells them what carrier to give it to. And finally the number tells the carrier was house to give it to.

A completely arbitrary naming system is of no value to anyone. Why would you assume that me and everyone else would use the same three words to describe a 3x3 plot of land?

But, then we need a lot of stupid things in this world because not everyone can make useful things but everyone needs a job.

333 cooments. Coincidence?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

There were 333 comments when I came into this discussion. I know, "Cool story, bro".

Maidenhead

[Dishwasha]

All these responses and nobody mentions the Maidenhead System. You all disappoint me.

Let me guess, you're French?

[Pseudonym Authority]

The UN didn't commission this. The devs have no obligation to conform to your bullshit objections that English sucks. If you want to make a version in Tagalog that's going to be even more totally useless, feel free to make one.

Re:Let me guess, you're French?

[HornWumpus]

Philosophical question: Can something be more useless, when it is already completely useless?

Re:Let me guess, you're French?

[Pseudonym Authority]

Yes. It can become worse than useless, at which point useful things must be expended to stop it from making other things useless. This site IS useless, but it's not quite so useless that I plan on filing a damages because it wasted my life.

I can beat that

[ObiWanKenblowme]

I can describe anywhere on earth in only 2 words: mostly harmless.

Forgot the Z-axis...

[Moof123]

My yard has about a dozen random combos, which is awfully precise. Unfortunately for their business plan, f you want to describe the world in location, you need to have a system adequate to handle muli-floor buildings.

Oh well, cute and worth the 30s I spent clicking around.

local language

[Anonymous Coward]

I gave it a try and seemed fun until I realize most people here do not speak English and the ones who do would have trouble spelling some of the words I am getting. It would have made some sense to use local language words. Otherwise it seems to be useless

2 words: Mostly Harmless

[jfdavis668]

That's where I am from.

hidden.forbidden.holyground

[Chris Mattern]

Hope I remembered to bring Data Drain...

Re:hidden.forbidden.holyground

[SuiteSisterMary]

Came to say this. Left satisfied.

What Three [English] Words

[Mozai]

Will there be a version for non-English speakers?
One of the nice bits about using latitude & longitude is that the numbers are still sensible no matter what language is used.

Neogeography is supposed to be fun

[Daniel_Stuckey]

And this is another prime example. Cheers.

weapons.mass.destruction

[Anonymous Coward]

We couldn't find any results for weapons.mass.destruction

I should have known...

A word by any other name

[Froggels]

Three 64 bit DWORD values should be enough for anyone

spam.spam.spam

[Anonymous Coward]

"We couldn't find any results for spam.spam.spam" :-(

We already have this.

[Sir Holo]

Don't we already have a system for this?

It's called latitude and longitude.

Fort Meade, MD

[Anonymous Coward]

base.belong.us

dotcom.investment.opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

fails.yet.again
idiots.never.learn
repeat.same.mistakes
trending.on.twitter
worth.fifty.zillion
money.all.gone

The service has a point...

[GumphMaster]

The service has a point, but it is not locating stuff with three word combos. The point is to provide a global geek challenge to reverse engineer the location -> words algorithm, determine the word list, and write a decent haiku/world tour mashup.

new anime dot hack/3words

[Anonymous Coward]

already attempted in "the world" and that had inconsistant results

Breaking news

[Anonymous Coward]

http://w3w.cm/lost.person.found

reassure.apes.mercy

[NemosomeN]

Some people may have a problem with this one.

Re:reassure.apes.mercy

[vikingpower]

...and close to that one there are "backup.cringing.sprinkles" and "interception.script.calling". Must be a branch of the NSA over there.

What the Hell...?

[No Grand Plan]

This has to be the single most pointless thing I've seen in a good many years.

Re:What the Hell...?

[vikingpower]

Pointless, maybe. Amusing and entertaining, certainly. I am not so certain, however, about its complete pointlessness. Three words are actually very easy to keep in mind. Remember xkcd's "correct battery staple horse".

Re: What the Hell...?

[No Grand Plan]

Well, yes... at least, I remembered that there was an xkcd that has something to do with random words for passwords. I didn't remember the actual words!

UTM

[Ironweaver]

Universal.Transverse.Mercator I'm an archaeologist and I use UTM coordinates every day, which breaks down the surface of the earth into 1x1 m squares so it's more accurate than w3w. Pointless

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

Go Habs Go

my living room

[Anonymous Coward]

five disparate cats

OK, so for any location on Earth:

[Anonymous Coward]

Third. Planet. Out.

Not that helpful, methinks...

i am here.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am indeed.

every.daily.mistress

[vikingpower]

Believe it or not, that is what they come up with for my street.

Naples, Italy

[Anonymous Coward]

Corrupt, Trash, Lost

Naples, Italy

[Anonymous Coward]

Naples, Italy:

Corrupt, Trash, Lost

I wonder which place gets

[maroberts]

complete.s**t.hole

Did you know that

[Chrisq]

cats catch mice in Minnesota, dogs chase cats in Jamaica, and people catch colds in Australia?

Two xkcd memes combined

[Arancaytar]

(Memorable passwords and geohashing.)

dragons.caves.hidden

[postermmxvicom]

dragons.caves.hidden This exists....

Make it 1.5mx1.5m

[excelsior_gr]

This will take playing D&D to a whole new level!

Solution looking for a problem?

[AC-x]

It seems to me this is a bit of a solution looking for a problem as there are already 2 very good ways of telling someone else your location:

1) "Meet me at starbucks on whereever street."

2) Click your GPS location in google maps etc. and select the share option.

Yes, it was needed

[Anonymous Coward]

because the Maidenhead Grid Locator wasn't invented yet.

It's amazing that people get paid to do such a stupid thing.

Ocean City, MD

[wikid_one]

Ahhhhh, more tourists!

ehm..

[Anonymous Coward]

http://w3w.cm/humanities.nets.expiration
http://w3w.cm/finally.laying.jobless

I really wanted to have "no more secrets" there... ;)

More filtration needed

[bronzemug]

Actuals: large.fleshy.melons big.donkey.member sticky.middle.finger

Re:More filtration needed

[bronzemug]

engorged.private.parts

(... Argh! that one's in the middle of the ocean)

Re:More filtration needed

[bronzemug]

totally.brainless.idea..........(this is too much fun)

That one's in Uzbekistan

"mostly harmless"

[arctother]

See, its already been done with just two words.

Under the button 'Buy one word'

[yurigoul]

>A OneWord is a personalised word of letters and numbers for a location of your choice. Read more...

>All OneWords start with *

And then the prices to have that word from 1 year to 10 - all prices in GBP

I bet that if you click on that link from a google owned IP-adress the text will be different.

.hack/sign?

[Alok]

Did they get this from the dungeon addressing system in .hack series - where the right combination of 3 words teleports you to the corresponding dungeon. I'd like to know if they at least use some of those names for the studios or game companies related to hack :-)

Bleh

[Anonymous Coward]

A useful namespace would be a simple, standardized hash function that assigned each cell a unique pseudorandom triplet from a fixed, small dictionary.

Instead they set up an arbitrary namespace and sell addresses - this is just a scheme to bilk businesses out of their money, like a yellow-pages service. It invites people to compete for popular addresses, and also invites competing address systems set up by other people who want a piece of the pie.

Missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course latitude.longitude.elevation is nowhere on the map.

Stone Cold Sober

[Julz]

Nominating the Himalayas as Stone Cold Sober

Mexico

[Anonymous Coward]

Full of Mexicans

Er... "jiggly.flesh.melons"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who w/ any self respect would want to state their location as "jiggly.flesh.melons" -- it's in Nicaragua near the Honduras border. Or "swinging.manly.organs" -- it's in Norway near Trondheim. Or "granny.licks.grandpa" -- it's in Alberta near Winefred Lake. I expect they've just mapped strings of digits to arbitrary words, and *any* combination of those words will map back to a legit coordinate. Just think of all the fun places you can go with words like: smallish, scratching, fishnets, organs, swinging, secretary, stiff, wiggly, jiggly, afterglow, opiates, seducing, enjoyed, etc... Just scan the map for the words that are used, then mix and match, and see where you end up! "Pink.bubblegum.lipstick" -- in New South Wales. "Seducing.pious.nuns" -- near Fort Stockton, TX. You get the idea...