What3words: The app that can save your life
bbc.comReminder that you should avoid what3words. Still unfortunate that some governments fell into using them.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2019/03/why-bother-with-what-three-....
> The algorithm used to generate the words is proprietary. You are not allowed to see it. You cannot find out your location without asking W3W for permission.
> If you want permission, you have to agree to some pretty long terms and conditions. And understand their privacy policy. Oh, and an API agreement. And then make sure you don't infringe their patents.
> You cannot store locations. You have to let them analyse the locations you look up. Want to use more than 10,000 addresses? Contact them for prices!
This reads exactly like a press release from W3W, the private entity. I'm not clear on why the BBC thought it would be within their rights to publicise it in this way, other than they didn't know they were basically advertising a product (NOT doing so is a cornerstone of the BBC philisophy).
It's also entirely unclear to me why the emergency services dispatchers wouldn't just ask a caller to read out their GPS location from any webservice which can report it. Hell, they could set up "999.gov.uk" or similar to show exactly their GPS location.
I'd be interested to know if BBC checked any 999 call handling centres to see if this was common advice.
This sounds awfully like a PR puff piece. (In fact a link to it is liked by their PR person https://twitter.com/miriamfrankLDN/likes, and the images come straight from their PR archive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1S-kYBJIjhfkIElyONvod...)
If they had a smartphone with GPS and data connectivity so they could download an app, they could use that to share their exact coordinates without having to download this proprietary app that wants to copyright the concept of location.
Just on my homescreen alone I have 4 apps that can already share my exact location: Google Maps, Apple Maps, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger
Whether this article is a puff piece, i think is less important (though it sure seems it to me). The important aspect here is that for some people GPS is failing them; and to me it's an UI/UX problem.
For example...Why do developers use text names for variables in their programs, and why don't they just use binary - which are clearly more precise? </sarcasm>
If this is in fact a proprietary thing, then I really dislike that. If something is actually, supposedly this useful, then it should be public domain. However, I'll give credit to the founders of what3words for attempting to solve an issue that they ran into (to scratch their itch as it were). Would "fixing" the delivery issue with the government service (postal service in the original case) be the appropriate solution? Would better UI for current GPS apps be another solution? Maybe, probably...But the founders took a hypothesis and ran with it to test it out; kudos to them for that. Clearly, it is working for some people. While no one might argue for the benefits of precision that conventional GPS coordinates bring, what is clear - in real life - is that some people could benefit from an alternative UI for describing their location.
So, a puff piece, yeah sure; it seems it to me. Nifty and novel concept for using an alternative "language" for indicating and describing location; yep. Is it great? I guess we'll see. Does it have to be a whole, different thing, or can it be a layer on top of legacy GPS? Who knows?
Do YOU have a better alternative???
Nearby locations have radically different 3 words - thus it is useless for distances and small typos can lead to arbitrarily large errors.
You mean like if the following GPS location is uttered verbally to, say, a first responder: 40.7485452,-73.9879575 ...you likely would end up in midtown NYC...while if i verbally forget to include the "-"...then i end up in Kyrgyzstan? ;-)
I'm teasing you of course (all in good fun). But you certainly make valid points: what3words isn't perfect...But, i still stand by the point that it's a novel approach, AND that there's an opportunity here (here, i mean an opportunity for the betterment of society, safety, humanity, etc., less about "business opportunity").
There are many alternative systems that are open and based on algoritmes. The only downside of those: they do not have massive VC money backing them to do the marketing. But then again, in the end these VCs will need a massive return. Guess who will pay for that ;-)
nothing wrong with the basic idea of using words, but this implementation serves as a hash to obfuscate locations through a closed standard. One could form a grid per word and make it finer in steps, but then people would understand buffalo is US, banana is NYC, and bogus is midtown, and be able to use the system without the whatthreewords service... thinking about it we do have those words already, US.NYC.midtown would work just fine...
Aren't longitude/latitude co-ordinates even more precise? There's a bunch of free apps that give that information out. Am I missing something?
>I tried to get people to use longitude and latitude but that never caught on," Mr Sheldrick said.
Well, if it's a life or death situation Mr Sheldrick, I'm pretty sure people would catch on fairly quick
It's easier to say a string of words than a string of numbers. There's also more intrinsic redundancy against small mistakes, that with a co-ordinate could move the designated area by hundreds of miles.
I don't like the fact it's an opaque monopoly, but as a way to designate locations for human use, it's effective.
If you're in the UK, moving the area by hundreds of miles would be obviously detectable. If you said to the operator "I don't know where I am, somewhere in the New Forest" and then you gave them a long/lat in Newcastle, they'd know to check again. Given that phone towers connect emergency calls to local dispatchers, even saying roughly where you are isn't necessary.
Long-lat are highly effective precisely because almost anyone can read a number [including dyslexic people], and because the concept of a numeric pair as a GPS location is understood, at least in passing, by almost everybody.
And if you're in many places globally, particularly the backwoods, you could displace or misread a digit, point out a location well away from your position, and still be pointing at "a forest".
Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.
Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission. That matters when eg: using a CB radio, or there's a blizzard blowing into a phone's pickup.
> Anyone can read a number? Hardly. A huge number of people would have trouble getting all the digits, precisely and in order without mistakes.
You only need 3 decimal places for ~100m accuracy. So really you're talking a 5 digit number and a 4 digit number (in the UK). A sensible presentation of that data would not be hard to read for almost anyone who doesn't have sight problems.
Moreover, a service like the theoretical "999.gov.uk" could log a person's GPS location and give them (say) a three word codephrase to pass to the dispatcher to lookup the record on the backend. No more or less effort, but not proprietary and harder to mess up.
> Also, words have audio redundancy. If I say "apple" you get the same data as if I say "a_ple" or "_pple" or "app_e" or if you don't, you know there was a glitch and can ask for retransmission.
This is true. I don't think there's a good way to fix that with numbers.
Isn't the argument also that when tired, stressed, cold, and maybe even injured, it's easier to tell a 999/911 operator three English words you're used to, rather than a string of numbers most people don't have any context for.
what context does 'bears.agitated.trampolines' mean? It has exactly the same amount of information as 53.958332, -1.080278, not only that but if you've _ever_ tried to say words over the telephone on a bad line, you end up having to do the NATO alphabet (did you say bears or chairs?), so you're reading out letters anyway. Not only _that_ but _everyone_ can plug long/lat co-ordinates into something and get an answer, they don't need a proprietary piece of software to achieve the same goal.
"Bears... no, bears, you know like Yogi and Boo Boo. Agitated, like I'm getting now. Trampolines, those things you bounce up and down on".
And when I said context, I didn't mean that they would understand what those three words point to, but rather they instantly can read those words having read them before. Long/Lat for most people isn't something they have ever used, so simple things like the "-1" might get missed. Admittedly the operator is likely to know that '1.080278' doesn't make sense given the country they are in and will automatically add the -, but it doesn't hurt to have options?
Trouble is, you can also get locations for "bared.agitated.trampolines" and "fear.agitate.trampoline", and playing a game of charades isn't necessarily more intuitive to a stressed person than reading out a string of numbers - like a telephone number....
I was thinking the same thing.
I believe it's just easier for the average person to communicate three words than two multi-digit-precision numbers.
Prior discussions: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15579017 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198
They summarise as "proprietary & commercial, not obvious to humans without the service, and not compatible with maps."
If you're looking for a compact addressing system, have a look at the Google-developed, openly-available plus codes. https://plus.codes/
TIL! Thanks for sharing this!
They had a smartphone with working GPS and they didn't know where they were...
Something's rotten with article. It resembles an advertisement more than a news article.
If they had a cell phone and was lost in a forest why didn't they just boot up maps (they had bandwidth enough to download an app) and walk out of there?
It's not an advertisement, the BBC are explicitly not allowed to provide that kind of content. Also, you've got to understand the mentality of someone when they are stressed and scared. They wouldn't be thinking straight and the fairly simple task of following a line on Google Maps becomes much harder. Additionally, when dealing with navigating in rural locations, it's not as simple as just 'go in straight line to place X'. There is terrain to navigate around, which is not obvious in the dark, especially when you're not familiar with the location.
They had obviously got to the point of calling the emergency services, so let's make it easier for them to be located, rather than complaining that they should have just got their compass out and sucked it up.
Just because the BBC didn't know it was an advertisement doesn't mean it isn't an advertisement. I have sent an email to their news team encouraging them to re-read the article and letting them know that they may be accidentally promoting a product. I suspect their editors may have mistaken the "scientific" skin of the article as being of academic interest rather than of business interest.
There's a lot of bits that don't make very much sense. Hypotheticals involving people don't have a phone signal and can't be sent the app by emergency services but they can still convey a what3words message to them (using what? semaphore?) People don't already have a GPS enabled app on their phone?
Relevant PG article that always gets brought up here when an article which is obviously a PR effort gets posted here http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
This is a repost of something that was posted today already : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20702995