[sandGorgon]

Google "Plus Codes" are being used in India - especially in underserved communities like slums.

https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ . If you want to use this tech + operations expertise in other geographies...just reach out to them. They intend to share their knowhow and expertise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd3gGspgVGs

Also from what i understand, after the success in Kolkata, this was then used in Native American communities.

P.S. Plus Codes are open source - https://github.com/google/open-location-code And they are well researched.

>The character set for Open Location Code was selected out of over eight billion possibilities, using a word list of 10,000 words from 30 languages. All possible sets were scored on whether they could spell the test words, and the most promising sets evaluated by hand.

>Plus codes can be encoded and decoded offline.

>Plus codes do not depend on any infrastructure, and so are not dependent on any organisation or company for their continued existence or usage.

[rvnx]

If it wasn't funded and publicised by Google, I think Plus codes would have disappeared already. These codes feel quite difficult to remember and less logical than the long/lat that they try to replace; additionally, the letters are very ambiguous to pronounce in English for a non-native (E and I, J and G).

It feels like it was a quick hack of base64-ish encoding of the long/lat that evolved into a product to get an internal promotion

[sandGorgon]

this was deployed in Indian slums - which is probably the largest , non-native English speaking cohort as it can get.

[weird-eye-issue]

The fake image carousel which is actually a lightbox on https://www.addressingtheunaddressed.org/ is one of the more interesting things I've seen on a website

[bellyfullofbac]

Weird stuff. I guess the webdev took a screenshot from some other website and it included the arrows...

You wrote "lightbox" and I read "mapbox", I thought someone implemented an image carousel by adding photos instead of map tiles in a Google Maps-esque UI (like this but with unconnected pictures: https://www.nightcity.io)

[dariusj18]

That's what happens when you send a non specific support request to someone who doesn't care.

[neolog]

> An Evaluation of Location Encoding Systems

https://github.com/google/open-location-code/wiki/Evaluation...

[sandGorgon]

>Making a mistake with a code may simply display somewhere else - for example, on What3Words, "banana rabbit monkey" is a location in Argentina, "banana monkey rabbit" is in Russia.

[onion2k]

That's a problem if you don't know anything more than the three words, but it's quite useful if you do. For example, if you know someone is travelling in South America then the huge difference means one is obviously wrong. It would be more problematic if the two locations were similar.

Making it clear when something is incorrect for a given context is quite a helpful feature. But you need to have the necessary context.

[md_]

Does W3W offer an easy way to see the locations of potential typos? E.g. can you put in a country constraint and have W3W give you the most similar (by edit distance, word swaps, etc) locations to the one you input that match that constraint?

[petepete]

For a moment I thought you meant Google+ had some kind of location system that'd found a niche use!

Thanks for the link though, hadn't heard of plus codes.

[kilroy123]

So few people know about this. I actually wish it was used a lot more.

[drran]

It uses Latin alphabet. Most countries with Latin alphabet have an address system already in place for centuries.

[Cthulhu_]

https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_addresses_in_the_Republ...

[drran]

I mean, if receiver will write a text in the address box, then parcel will be delivered to him.