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...