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The big advantage over w3w is that this is open. Proprietary addressing systems are a bad thing for fairly obvious reasons.

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The other advantage of this over w3w is that it the encoding makes any kind of sense.

w3w's feature where it moves an address onto a different continent because you forgot to pluralize a word is the worst idea for an address encoding.

It was actually by design, so you know you have the wrong place. We already have systems like postcodes where small changes result in small geographic offsets and they have major downsides too.

Geocoding seems really simple until you have to build one and have customers use it.

Geocoding is probably simpler if its users aren't "customers".

Lots of systems have checksums. It appears to me that what3words's complexity is designed to make it intentionally difficult for someone else to reimplement.

And the big problem with open systems is that there are so many of them and nobody will pay to market and implement any of them to make one a standard.

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