Terence Eden’s Blog

endless.downward.spiral - is this the beginning of the end of What3Words?

@edentmaps what3words · 16 comments · 750 words · Viewed ~1,891 times.

Long-time readers know that I am not a fan of What Three Words. I think it is a closed, proprietary, and user-unfriendly attempt to enclose the commons. I consider that it has some dangerous failure modes. A year ago, The Financial Times wrote about What3Words' business woes. But it looks like things are about to get a lot worse. As reported by a user on Reddit, Mercedes cars no longer support What3words. I was in touch with What3words customer support and they confirmed me that Mercedes…

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Why bother with What Three Words?

@edentmaps open standards standards what3words · 158 comments · 1,400 words · Viewed ~207,499 times.

I'll be wording this post carefully as What 3 Words (W3W) have a tenacious PR team and, probably, have a lot more lawyers than I do. W3W is a closed product. It is a for-profit company masquerading as an open standard. And that annoys me. A brief primer. The world is a sphere. We can reference any point on the surface of Earth using two co-ordinates, Longitude and Latitude. Long/Lat are numbers. They can be as precise or as vague as needed. Humans can't remember long strings of numbers, and …

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