Dartmouth 

Plankton.issue.hopeless.
Pilning Station ……….

Clicked on those links - interesting, didn't know about all the problems with w3w

Don't know how long that's been around but I only found out about it last week, by accident when I sent an "I'm here" text to my wife and my phone asked if I wanted to send a live location link. Nice feature.

Can be useful for summoning the emergency services.
I can remember when I was working a not insignificant fire at a factory. The person calling the FB gave what she believed to be the post code and the fire tenders turned up at the sorting office in the nearby city.

I must admit on reflection that an early low-tech version of something like w3w would have made my life somewhat easier 30 or so years ago.  I had to get packages delivered by road to London Underground stations, and certainly in those days quite a few stations had no post code or building number, or even any real presence at street level, just one or more staircases down from the pavement and possibly a decoy former entrance where lifts had been replaced by escalators in a different location.

There's a whole bunch of issues with what3words and they often get tangled up.

I think at its core it's a decent enough idea, for the reasons Electric train has cited - it's easy to remember and communicate, and accurate enough for most purposes.

There are genuine technical problems with it, chiefly that the inventors didn't do a good enough job of removing 'soundalike' words. I suspect these are probably fixable - basically, you quietly stop offering those 3m x 3m squares which have soundalike words. That means you go down to 6m x 6m accuracy at that spot, which is still probably good enough.

But the real problem is that it's privately owned and copyrighted. Imagine a situation where your address was "11 High Street, Frogtown", but the only way for anyone to find out where that actually was involved paying money to Address Corporation, Inc. That's what3words. Their lawyers repeatedly threaten anyone who attempts to provide an alternative way of working out what3words addresses.

The address algorithm itself was invented and settled back in 2013. The entire work of their company since then has been marketing it. They have spent an eight-figure sum on this and barely recouped anything: w3w's losses are astronomical. The only plausible way forward for the company is to be bought by someone big - Amazon, Google, one of the major couriers - but so far they're not biting.

Up until now their PR^▸ (Public Relations) strategy has involved giving free access to emergency services and the like, because it's generated lots of good free publicity. But there's no guarantee this will continue. Tying your location to what3words is making a bet that the next owner of the company won't start charging. That's not a bet I'd make.