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0 pointsyardstick4y ago0 comments

The risk comes from mishearing someone. Especially relevant in Europe with all the different accents.

With w3w, Gare Du Nord is sunshine.frame.acted while sunshine.frames.acted is Abu Dhabi and sunshine.frame.actor is in Malaysia.

https://what3words.com/sunshine.frame.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.acted https://what3words.com/sunshine.frames.actor

While in wherewords.id, changing rate to fate or late or gate still produces Paris, but wrong location.

https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/rate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/fate/thunder https://wherewords.id/juniper/detailed/late/thunder

Having an accurate location is important for emergency services. If you’re on a phone call trying to get an ambulance for someone having a seizure, or reporting a fire, shooting, whatever, it’s important to get the accurate location straight away.

If the call centre person misheard your location, but the code is still in Paris, they will think it’s correct and dispatch to the wrong location. It would take too much time after realising the mistake to get the correct location. So with w3w it is far more obvious when these issues happen as suddenly the map is showing as Middle East or Asia, not Paris!

I don’t think an emoji checksum would help here either. Wink. Was that a tongue wink or smirk or etc.

(Full disclaimer: I don’t see the point in w3w either. It assumes people are prepared in advance to have the app on their phone, otherwise if they need to download it/visit its site they have internet so there are better ways of getting the location)

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kybernetikos4y ago

I still prefer the benefits that come with the hierarchical approach. You can learn where things are, if you're wrong and didn't know it in advance, you're still close to where you need to be, you can get a sense of how far away things are from each other even without looking them up or being online, and you can use context to reduce the amount of information you need to remember / communicate (e.g. say you're communicating 4 locations close to each other, most likely you can do that with 3+4 words with a hierarchical system).

The benefits of a random allocation vanish if you are building an application where Abu Dhabi, Malaysia and Paris are all reasonable answers. The w3w case is particularly bad because their wordlist is enormous and has so many ways you can confuse things.

I still think that a hierarchical system with an optional checkword/digit/emoji is the best solution to situations where you want to be 100% sure you got it right first time, but I accept that maybe the emoji is a bit too cute, and a normal word or number might be better.

I think the endgame for these types of systems doesn't need to assume online usage. It'd be fantastically useful in vehicle GPS systems for example, especially in countries with poor addressing.

trumpablehump4y ago

There are many word combination switches in close proximity in What3Words too. And if you consider sound-alikes it is worse.

What3Words is very much unsuitable for emergency situations and has been in the media for that several times.

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