There's this amazing new tool, and I keep thinking of new uses for it.

map.what3words.com

The creator of this site has divided all of Earth into 3m x 3m squares.
Roughly 9ft x 9ft for my Imperial friends. (It's an older metric, but it checks out.)

He's made it really simple to find any one of these squares, by naming each of them using 3 consecutive words from a list of 40,000.

I took this footage at awkward.dinners.relented

A few thousand miles from the above anchor, the locals told me they found this big ball on the reef and pulled it ashore.
I suggested it might be a mine.
If you want to go hit it with a hammer and find out, it's at superfast.crosswords.babbling

The entire world is covered, from the middle of a volcano to the far flung icecaps of the Arctic circle, and all of the vast oceans in between.
The implications for applications like privately owned fisheries and seasteading are huge.

My brother is a helicopter rescue crewman.
That just three words can guide his chopper to within a couple of metres of an injured bushwalker is groundbreaking.
He's also an avid camper, and recently found some glow-in-the-dark mushrooms.
He can now send others to that exact spot without reciting a long string of GPS co-ordinates.

Emergency roadside assistance
Campsite allocation for music festivals
Expo, fairground, concert or parking lot navigation
Paintball and airsoft teams co-ordinating attacks and meetups
Flashmobs, shady transactions, sordid hookups
Drone deliveries and self-driving car transfers
Off grid preppers living under the radar, and
Four billion people who currently have no address

Maybe my lad Fletcher here is digging at the beach and finds a ring.

I can do an "exact word match" search for the spot he found it, and perhaps the 8 neighbouring squares, and see if anyone has posted those same three words in that same order, claiming to have lost it.

A larger square or rectangular area can be indicated with diagonally opposite corner references, and if 3m x 3m is too large an area, it can be reduced again into 1m x 1m squares, listed 1-9, then they can be split again if required.

The more I think about this the more exciting it gets. Every place on earth now has its own name, and with a name comes a history and even an identity.

It solves problems at a very fundamental level just like blockchain technology does, and just like blockchain, the potential of what3words will only slowly be realised over time.

candle.light.dinner is in a field next to the Stateville Correctional Centre in Illinois
bend.over.backwards is in Canada, which I feel is appropriate

Can you think of any other use cases for this, favourite place names?
Share in the comments.
NB: Don't share a location you don't want tied to your identity publicly, forever

Disclaimer: I just found two previous posts on this by other steemers, but they're more than 3 months old and were read by a total of 34 people.

Every place on earth now has its own name, and with a name comes a history and even an identity

There's this amazing new tool, and I keep thinking of new uses for it.

https://map.what3words.com

The entire world is covered, from the middle of a volcano to the far flung icecaps of the Arctic circle, and all of the vast oceans in between. The implications for applications like privately owned fisheries and seasteading are huge.

Maybe my lad Fletcher here is digging at the beach and finds a ring.

The more I think about this the more exciting it gets. Every place on earth now has its own name, and with a name comes a history and even an identity.

As always, have a fantastic day

The entire world is covered, from the middle of a volcano to the far flung icecaps of the Arctic circle, and all of the vast oceans in between.
The implications for applications like privately owned fisheries and seasteading are huge.