When I first knew about w3w I thought it was some kind of a "solution in search of a problem", searching for other views on the matter I actually found a great blog post [1] with an explanation and a funny example as to why they don't help much, if you don't have time for a long read you can still skip to the last part where a fictional scenario using w3w is presented (that's the funny part).
[1] http://blog.telemapics.com/?p=589 Regards, Andrés ________________________________ From: Paul Johnson <ba...@ursamundi.org> Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2015 4:22 AM To: Martin Koppenhoefer Cc: openstreetmap Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] What3words On Tue, Nov 24, 2015 at 3:10 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdre...@gmail.com<mailto:dieterdre...@gmail.com>> wrote: 2015-11-24 8:54 GMT+01:00 Colin Smale <colin.sm...@xs4all.nl<mailto:colin.sm...@xs4all.nl>>: I think their idea is that you can quote a location with the words which for humans is much easier to memorize and less prone to mishearing over dodgy phone and radio links than lat/lon or some other scientific grid reference. yes, but it has a lot of other disadvantages, e.g. the fact that you can't know anything about the location without their API: you can't see from the 3 words where approximately a place is, and therefore you also can't see which 3-word-combinations are close to each other and which are far. Traditional addressing works much better for these situations where you already know something of the city, e.g. you can bet that Downing Street 11 is not too far away from Downing Street 10. Imagine a postman having to deliver a bag of letters with only 3-word addresses on them. He'd very likely need some kind of device and look up all of them rather than knowing them by heart. Or in the case of the traveling salesman/field service engineer scenario, I couldn't tell you where head.butt.teakettle is but give me a street address within about 50-70 miles of Tulsa or Oklahoma City's address origins and I can get you to within about a mile of that location and know which side of the road to be looking on straight off the top of my head, even if I've never been there before. And if it's an unnamed county road or a section line I happen to know the name of, I don't even need a map.
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