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You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

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AF62
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Re: You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

#244895

Postby AF62 » August 16th, 2019, 8:21 pm

mc2fool wrote:
AF62 wrote:
didds wrote:but of course people are more likely to remember

engine,doors,club

than they are

38.8977° N, 77.0365° W

didds

Unfortunately the flaw in the system is that is someone mis-remembers the words slightly, so engine, windows, club, then where on earth is that - the next block over, 100 miles away, 1000?

Nowhere near so close!

engine.doors.club - Rockford, Illinois, USA
engine.windows.club - Jining, Shandong Sheng, China

But if you forget the doors/windows are plural....

engine.door.club - Broadview Heights, Ohio, USA ... only 400ish miles from engine.doors.club, but ...
engine.window.club - Highmore, South Dakota, USA ... a long way from China!

And if you get the order wrong...

engine.club.doors - Clayton, Bradford, UK
engine.club.windows - Hamadān, Iran


And yet funnily enough the enormously intelligent journalists never mention this whenever this marvelous new invention is mentioned...


didds wrote:excellent post.

of course when whe nis forced to use

* upper case letters
* digits
* other characters

"correcthorsebatterystaple" isn't acceptable....

but "P4ssw0rd!" is !


You joke but I had a system at work refuse to accept any password I tried as it wouldn't accept 'real words' even though what I was trying wasn't.

In a fit of annoyance I tried 'abcd1234' - perfectly acceptable, so I carried on using that.

mc2fool
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Re: You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

#244903

Postby mc2fool » August 16th, 2019, 8:47 pm

AF62 wrote:
mc2fool wrote:
AF62 wrote:Unfortunately the flaw in the system is that is someone mis-remembers the words slightly, so engine, windows, club, then where on earth is that - the next block over, 100 miles away, 1000?

Nowhere near so close!

engine.doors.club - Rockford, Illinois, USA
engine.windows.club - Jining, Shandong Sheng, China

But if you forget the doors/windows are plural....

engine.door.club - Broadview Heights, Ohio, USA ... only 400ish miles from engine.doors.club, but ...
engine.window.club - Highmore, South Dakota, USA ... a long way from China!

And if you get the order wrong...

engine.club.doors - Clayton, Bradford, UK
engine.club.windows - Hamadān, Iran

And yet funnily enough the enormously intelligent journalists never mention this whenever this marvelous new invention is mentioned...

Actually it appears to be a feature -- "To prevent mistakes, similar 3 word addresses are placed as far apart as possible.", https://what3words.com/about-us/ -- and if you think about it that makes sense.

If I arrange to meet up with you in London and give you a three-word address for the location and you slightly mishear/misread it and when you enter that it gives you a location in China you're going to know something's wrong. If, on the other hand, it gave you a location somewhere else in London you'd go there and, even if it's close by, we might never find each other.....

AF62
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Re: You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

#244905

Postby AF62 » August 16th, 2019, 8:58 pm

mc2fool wrote:Actually it appears to be a feature -- "To prevent mistakes, similar 3 word addresses are placed as far apart as possible.", https://what3words.com/about-us/ -- and if you think about it that makes sense.

If I arrange to meet up with you in London and give you a three-word address for the location and you slightly mishear/misread it and when you enter that it gives you a location in China you're going to know something's wrong. If, on the other hand, it gave you a location somewhere else in London you'd go there and, even if it's close by, we might never find each other.....


But how are you then going to work out where on earth you should be if you have mis-remembered one of the words.

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Re: You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

#244915

Postby mc2fool » August 16th, 2019, 9:27 pm

AF62 wrote:
mc2fool wrote:Actually it appears to be a feature -- "To prevent mistakes, similar 3 word addresses are placed as far apart as possible.", https://what3words.com/about-us/ -- and if you think about it that makes sense.

If I arrange to meet up with you in London and give you a three-word address for the location and you slightly mishear/misread it and when you enter that it gives you a location in China you're going to know something's wrong. If, on the other hand, it gave you a location somewhere else in London you'd go there and, even if it's close by, we might never find each other.....

But how are you then going to work out where on earth you should be if you have mis-remembered one of the words.

The same way as if I said "under the clock at Waterloo" and you mis-remembered that as "under the clock at Paddington", or I said Red Lion and you remembered Green Man, or any other situation where you've got/remembered a wrong address.

At least with London/China you'll know it's wrong straight away and try and contact me before you even set off, whereas with Waterloo/Paddington or the wrong pub you won't begin to suspect something's wrong until you''re there and have been waiting for a while, in vain ...

Having said that, I must say that I think "By Nelson's Column" is a much better set of three words than beans.again.voting :D

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Re: You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

#244954

Postby Lanark » August 17th, 2019, 8:51 am

XFool wrote:Sigh!

This was all sorted out yonks ago with Mapcodes invented originally inside TomTom. Every few years somebody gets an award or is praised for reinventing the wheel. I've lost count of the number of times this particular example of a 'breakthrough' has been gushed over! OK, it may be a 'good idea', but what's new?

Sadly Mapcodes have never caught on and now even TomTom does not promote them - if it ever did. I still use them with my SatNav, if only they had been widely adopted and became the global standard. But then, in this area, there are already so many 'innovative standards' etc.

https://www.mapcode.com

From the FAQ:
This is not a mere technical challenge or intellectual exercise. As our friend Steve Coast, the founder of OpenStreetMap, puts it, the value of an addressing solution is “much less in just making any old algorithm and declaring the problem solved. The actual value here is first, to build a great algorithm for people, not just for PhDs in Mathematics. Second to market it.”

So just like the UK postcode, which is around £600/year last time I checked, they will charge companies £££ if they want access to the codes.
They do have a publicly available API right now, but like Twitter and Facebook I guarantee that will disappear (or start costing ££) once they hit a good market penetration
https://docs.what3words.com/api/v3/
"You shall not use the API for any application that replicates or attempts to replace the essential user experience of the Service or use the API to create a Product which functions substantially the same as the API. For example, the foregoing would include (but is not limited to) allowing any end user to derive a 3 Word Address Location from a 3 Word Address. You must not pre-fetch, cache, index, copy, re-utilise, extract, store (including in a database) or utilise any what3words Data in any way that means you are effectively circumventing making an API Request"

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Re: You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

#244955

Postby chas49 » August 17th, 2019, 8:56 am

mc2fool wrote:
Having said that, I must say that I think "By Nelson's Column" is a much better set of three words than beans.again.voting :D


///by.nelsons.column isn't a what3words location :)

Which, as it happens, shows that misremembering the words is quite likely to result in no location at all rather than the wrong one.

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Re: You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

#244961

Postby Lanark » August 17th, 2019, 9:27 am

Interesting that the BBC don't allow comments on that page - they probably don't want people suggesting the free mapcode.com app as an alternative.

As always the marketing money talks.

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Re: You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

#244980

Postby XFool » August 17th, 2019, 10:29 am

Lanark wrote:From the FAQ:
This is not a mere technical challenge or intellectual exercise. As our friend Steve Coast, the founder of OpenStreetMap, puts it, the value of an addressing solution is “much less in just making any old algorithm and declaring the problem solved. The actual value here is first, to build a great algorithm for people, not just for PhDs in Mathematics. Second to market it.”

I'm not sure where that FAQ is on the W3W site. But marketing is indeed the name of the game. W3W is obviously set up as a business, possibly it will therefore succeed in making W3W a world wide success, unlike the non profit Mapcode Foundation which has never seemed to have any real marketing behind it (no real money I guess) even from TomTom.

https://www.mapcode.com/non-profit

I only accidentally fund out about Mapcodes via curiosity about those "funny numbers etc." in the corner of my SatNav satellite status page (gone from latest products). It took the GPO/Post Office decades to get UK post codes into routine use and that was only in the UK.

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Re: You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

#245000

Postby Lanark » August 17th, 2019, 12:19 pm

I just installed the Mapcode app and it is noticably smaller and faster than the W3W app.

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Re: You can't get lost with this App - What3Words

#248393

Postby Clitheroekid » August 31st, 2019, 10:24 pm

I've only just seen this thread, but I've downloaded the app, and I think it's an excellent idea. I think it's far easier to remember a three word combination than a numerical one or, a fortiori (as we lawyers like to say!) a grid reference.

For those complaining that it could be misheard, of course it could, but 99.9% of people using it would send it in written form, so it's a purely theoretical problem.

It's quite entertaining to try various combinations and see what they produce. For example, it would seem a good idea for one of my Hampshire colleagues to buy a plot of land near Lymington - good.solicitor.offices

Or, even better, for any colleague looking to set up an office near Hamburg - excellent.solicitor.office

An ambitious baker might be drawn to delicious.cake.shop. However, he'd have to be a pretty special baker to get any trade, as it's in the middle of an uninhabited region of Venezuela, about 15 km from the nearest village.

I'm also wondering if someone has used the app to send coded messages. For example, bullion.buried.location is certainly remote enough to bury some treasure, as is stolen.goods.location.

And I must admit to being rather surprised to see where Our Glorious Leader is based, at lemon.fool.location ...

I can see this providing hours of entirely pointless entertainment! ;)


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