what3words

Hey, it’s summertime. So even if you’re working, you may be looking for a little something that’s a bit of a time-waster. But that isn’t as aggravating a bit of a time-waster as looking at Donald Trump’s latest tweets. Which, by the way, aren’t really worth looking at, even as a time-waster. There’s only so many “crooked Hillarys”, “rigged systems” and “dishonest medias” you can look at before you realize that Trump is actually pretty boring. Guess I’ll just wait for “crooked Hillary” and “dishonest media” to pick up on one of his outrages. Until then, yawn-o-meter. (Okay, the one about no outrage over Disney using a six-sided star on a Frozen book was shockingly entertaining. You’d think that a more sensible, presidential tweet might have been “Sorry about using content from Nazi-sympathizing group. Understand how people misconstrued it. Won’t happen again.” But then that wouldn’t have been Donald now, would it?)

So as a small summer, time-waster of a gift, I give you what3words, which has more than 140 characters, more than three words, to say for itself:

The world is poorly addressed. This is frustrating and costly in developed nations; and in developing nations this is life-threatening and growth limiting.

what3words is a unique combination of just 3 words that identifies a 3mx3m square, anywhere on the planet.

It’s far more accurate than a postal address and it’s much easier to remember, use and share than a set of coordinates.

Better addressing improves customer experience, delivers business efficiencies, drives growth and helps the social & economic development of countries.

There are 57 trillion of these squares that make up the planet, and as someone who lives in an ambiguous address, with multiple instances of the same street name throughout different sections of the city – half the time Uber is looking in another part of the city for me, and don’t get me going on when we were trying to get drugs delivered here when my husband was in hospice care – I like the idea that swift.penny.saves is all mine. (Although I would have preferred the neighboring designation of couple.sleep.error.)

Why not use longitude and latitude, you may well be asking yourself:

Using words means non-technical people can accurately find any location and communicate it more quickly, more easily and with less ambiguity than any other system like street addresses, postcodes, latitude & longitude or mobile short-links.

I spent the first 6.5 years of my life at voted.zest.react. My family then moved to snow.chins.fried. My mother moved to voted.zest.react – where my father grew up – from suffice.wing.crush.

There’s no end to the time wasting you can do once you download what3words to your smartphone (iPhone or Android). Every place you ever lived. Every place you ever worked. Every place everyone you know has ever lived or worked.

I don’t want to give any exact addresses away, so I’ll just do two-out-of three words, and let you figure out the third word (out of 40,000 possibilities). My sister Kath’s address includes the words bolts and yards. Trish’s address has the words couch and decide in it. My brother Rich’s location has worth and animal in it; Tom’s home address includes spines and tolerance.

Why stop with my sibs, when there’s all those cousins to look up?

Babs is redefining.treatment. MB’s is a bit scarier. Hers includes manipulated and disappeared. Ellen, on the other hand, has the benign deck and lunch in her address.

My friend Peter, who is a BC grad, and is, thus, an Eagle, has the word eagles in his address. But what am I to make of Shelly’s location, which includes tanks and dust?

The Donald, by the way, lives at melt.sang.party. But he’s hoping to move into engine.doors.cubs. With luck, by November he’ll have had the meltdown that even his greatest supporter will recognize as disqualifying, and the Trumpeteers will be singing “The party’s over.” Back to melt.sang.party to you, Mr. T.