what3words: Navigation & Maps

I just told my family members to download and install what3words. Everybody should have it. This app can save lives. Don't get stuck in a situation where you can't communicate your exact location except in the most circumstantial fashion, by numerical coordinates, or by saying what you see around you, or by walking to find the mile marker while other drivers are zooming by at 65mph. What if you are trapped in earthquake debris, or are on a rooftop in a flood, or have lost your way walking in the Pine Barrens like Paulie and Chris in The Sopranos, or had a bad fall while hiking? Three words is all it takes for people to locate you with a precision of a 3x3m square.

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This app has great potential to get to a much more accurate location than normal GPS, but it has a couple of shortcomings that need to be addressed. First, if you decide to save more than a few locations you will have a hard time finding the one you want since there isn’t any way to sort them. They are just listed in the order you saved them. Until app makers like Apple add 3words to their contact app this is a problem. 3words could at least list them in alphabetical order using the name you set for the location. Second, the voice recognition is useless. I set 3 words to US English and it never locates the correct address. It always finds addresses that aren’t even in the US and the street numbers and names aren’t even close to what I am saying. One other small thing is when I copy an address from Contacts that includes an apartment number or suite number, 3words isn’t smart enough to parse out the apt or suite info so it can’t find the address. I have to edit it out myself manually. Since voice recognition doesn’t work, the app is kind of useless if you are in a hurry. It will also be much more useful if Apple and others add support to recognize the /// as a link so you don’t have to copy and paste the location.

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This is a very good idea and concept. The app though needs some improvements: 1) A way to actually copy the three words without all the extra text copied with it. Maybe this is in the settings maybe this is a separate ‘copy’ selection. 2) A way to pronounce the three words. Yes there’s a microphone to listen for input but there is no output. 3) selecting neighboring squares around your Geo location is very clunky. The app should have accessed all of the neighboring square data. It should be much quicker than it is. 4) when absolute precision is not necessary, it would be great to have a list of the three words surrounding you. That way it would be easy to find an easy, pronounceable, & fun three word combination. This would be useful for finding a word selection for your house or business when it is acceptable to be off a little bit.

Thing is: this is such a great idea. Extremely well thought out, in spite of some comments of people who don’t get it. But I hope this can gradually gather steam (you really need some publicity!), as the most serious problem is that people who tend to understand *why* this is a good idea don’t need it as much as those who don’t know how hard it is to locate a place and communicate that accurately. As more and more people use it, however, hopefully the network effect will amplify its relevance. My brother drives for Lyft, and really wishes they used it.

There are so many possibilities for what could be done with this app. What if you could connect it to social media and publicly share locations. Or you could look at the map and turn a filter on to view popular saved locations that are represented by different colors based on how many people have saved them. You could learn the popular places at a state park and go there without having to do tons of research! Keep adding on to this, you’ve got something good here.