Mapping the world by 3 words

I don't catch QI all that much since Stephen Fry left, but it can be OK in moderate doses.

The episode shown this week on the ABC I watched in full, and found it quite enjoyable.   This is how I learnt about What3Words, which I see has been around for about 6 years, but until now escaped my attention.

The Wikipedia entry explains:

what3words is a geocoding system for the communication of locations with a resolution of three metres. What3words encodes geographic coordinates into three dictionary words; the encoding is permanently fixed. For example, the omphalos of Delphi, believed by the ancient Greeks to be the center of the world, was located at "spooky.solemn.huggers". what3words differs from most other location encoding systems in that it displays three words rather than long strings of numbers or letters.

What3words has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API that enables bidirectional conversion between what3words address and latitude/longitude coordinates. As the system relies on a fixed algorithm rather than a large database of every location on earth, it works on devices with limited storage and no Internet connection.

According to the company its revenue comes from charging businesses for high-volume use of the API that converts between 3 words and coordinates; services for other users are free of charge.^[1]

The "about" section of the business's website (I haven't downloaded the app - even though I can see many thrilling but potentially baffling conversation starters by telling new people I've just met the 3 word location in which we are standing) explains more:

3 word addresses are intentionally randomised and unrelated to the squares around them. To avoid confusion, similar sounding addresses are also placed as far from each other as possible. The app will account for spelling errors and other typing mistakes and make suggestions, based on 3 word addresses nearby.

I, like Sandi Toksvig, find this whole thing oddly intriguing.   Yet when I tried to pass on the excitement to my teenage kids over dinner last, my son said he could describe the conversation in 3 words: "This is boring".   This made his sister declare that the first joke he had ever made that she found funny.

Hence, via nerd-dom, I brought my children closer together.  

I am now going to download the app.

Update:  Cool - one grid close to my house's front door has "robots" in the 3 words, and in such a way that the two preceding words can be taken as describing them.     Using the voice search function though is a bit silly.  Because the phrases are randomised, if the phone hears the phrase slightly wrong, it will throw up locations all around the planet.  It does give a choice of three possible versions of what it thinks it heard.   Easier to type it in, though.