Regular readers know that I am not a fan of locational
coding systems as a replacement for postal (humanly readable) addresses. I do
not believe they can replace humanly readable addressing, and, despite a lot of
hot air coming from various companies, I have yet to see a system in full
working order.
Take What3Words, for example. OK, so I know I seem to bang on about them a
lot, but I have a strong aversion to hype, and a stronger aversion to any
organisation that sells themselves through clever marketing shored up by –
well, very little else that is apparent to me. Anyway, if you
live on the oxygen of publicity, and you keep sticking your head above the
parapet, you have to expect to be shot at.
So, What3Words. They
have announced in the past couple of years tie ups with various national postal
services – Mongolia, Sint Maarten, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Tonga, Nigeria,
Solomon Islands and Kiribati, in that order.
What3Words is an off the shelf solution – it should be fast and simple
for any organisation to implement. So,
where are the implementations? I look at a lot of addresses in my job – I data
gaze millions of addresses – and I still haven’t seen a single locational code
actually being used.
So, I set myself a task – check these countries’ websites
for progress on implementation.
Mongolia has a page of information about
What3Words. Sint Maarten has nothing (that I could find) but there is a video
on their Facebook page. Côte d’Ivoire,
Djibouti, Nigeria … nothing. Not a word. Tonga’s website had been hacked when
I was checking…. Only on the Solomon Islands’ website is What3Words given the
place it should have if it is a replacement for, or supplement to, the existing
humanly readable addressing system. “Introducing Solomon Islands [sic] New
Addressing System” it trumpets. A sound I would have expected from other
websites. But it is not to be. In fact,
not a single one of these websites, even that of the Solomon Islands, has the
contact address for the postal service concerned given in anything other than a
traditional postal address format. Not one contains its What3Words' address.
Leading by example? Apparently not.
So, what’s the progress on implementation in those six
countries outside Solomon Islands? Is it
to be kept secret from the users? Will
it be quietly dropped? Or am I over estimating the speed at which these
organisation work? (Though if Solomon Islands can do it, this should not be
a valid excuse for the others). If it’s the latter, I notice that both
Lebanon and Mongolia (again!) announced a partnership with NAC to use their
codes in 2013. Four years later and nothing (visible) has happened.
This is not to say that code systems aren’t being
introduced, and implemented. Look at
Ghana, for example, happy to publicise and implement its sparkling new home-grown system, and to publicise its own address in traditonal human-readable form, and as a locational code. I am curious to see how the uptake for that system is, and how well this implementation sticks.
So what’s going on here?
The emperor’s new clothes? Crying wolf? Let’s
see some implementation, and measurements of the success of new systems. All this announcing without follow-up is
unhelpful in the extreme.
