1:14 When he says Latin American countries calling out land marks, it's no joke. In Nicaragua, traveling with my family, I learned they used land marks that used to be there, but are now gone. I ended up just having someone drop a pin nearby and I would route to the pin and go from there.
@@lifdrazor yeah, except if you dont live in a big city.. houses have addresses, but mine was only known as the house near ortigoza, behind the red truck
colombia depending on the city it varies, the big ones do use addresses but smaller ones like cartagena, there are addresses but nobody uses them, instead you tell 'yeah neighborhood x, near the supermarket' or "do you know how to get to Y?", "follow my directions" etc etc.
@@lifdrazorThe real trouble comes with growth - without careful planning, a NW street can become SE with a different numbering system when a city becomes a suburb.
5:15 former FedEx address finder here (no, not a driver) if you don’t know your address PLEASE scribble your plus code in the address field. Writing gibberish, your email, your phone number, or an address you’re not sure is correct slows us down. If you really don’t know where you’re sending your package to, email is best.
@@mynameisben123 see, I thought the exact same thing as you, and I couldn’t even fathom trying to send a package somewhere that doesn’t exist. The reality is, there are a lot of people that don’t double check their shipping information, then on top of that there’s another layer of automated systems that will sometimes break it or mangle weirdly formatted addresses, people who sincerely don’t understand that if you live in an apartment complex/building, you need to add that to your address info. And then even on top of that, there are the people who are confidently wrong, and insist you’re wrong about their address, even if it’s one that isn’t possible (think a 2000 address on a street that only goes up to 800’s) and will argue with you until you piece together enough clues from them that you can describe their house from aerial imagery, or street view.
In Australia we have an app for emergency services. If you call via the app it sends all the information with your call. The app uses GPS, Closest Address, Nearest Cross Streets and What Three Words to help dispatch emergency services to your exact location. It helps a lot in regional areas where you can be a long way from the address.
Trying to use the what 3 words thing in marginal signal is not as smooth an experience as you'd think, especially when there's limited vocabulary or accents involved.
1:53, this is only partially true, to be fair. XKCD #2170 is highly relevant here. 3 decimals is probably sufficient to point out the location, 4 if you also want to point out where the door is. More than so is just silly. And based on the example shown with the blue and orange house, it's quite obvious just looking at the numbers that (40.822, 14.429) and (40.823,14.428) ought to have been sufficient instead of that whole mess of redundant precision where you want the pin accurate to the nearest atom. Not to say that the plus codes aren't more user friendly (they definitely are), but traditional coordinates really don't HAVE to be that absurdly long and unwieldy as the example shown.
XKCD 927 also applies, both the latlon coordinate system and a dozen other map grid and coordinate systems already exist. I'm partial to the Military Grid Reference System since that's what I've used the most.
This XKCD is totally false and misleading! I was pinpointing data center location very recently, and less than 5 digits was highly inaccurate to pinpoint the building! Let alone door...
what3words isn't perfect, though. Sometimes places that are near enough can use the same words, so for things like rescues, teams have been sent to the wrong place. And it's not an open-standard, but owned by a private company. So I'm guessing there are fees to pay somewhere, such as to implement it in your own app, or to request specific words be used or not for a location you own?
I called 911 to report to the police a hit and run recently, and it threw me for a loop when they asked for an address....like, no, I don't have a freaking address, have no idea where the heck I am, my car is totalled in the middle of a suburban street, across from a Chinese restaurant that I can't read because it's in Chinese. Best I can do is give you is the two major intersections 1.5 minute drive away from here.
Ireland was one of the last advanced countries to get postcodes in 2014 or something, but when we finally got them there was a per-household code, so no general area or general building nonsense and confusion about basements or specific apartments. It was a total mess before in the countryside. It was name, area (sometimes), township. Thats it. Even worse is because of generations of farm subdivisions about 7 houses share my surname in my area. The postman (who also was a relative) had to know everyone's names and children's names in our 2 square mile area because we all had the same name and address. Repeat this in every area along his route with 20 people with the same name and address in their area. Madness. Every time he went on holiday it was chaos. That and ranked choice voting are one of the few steps in the right direction we made in recent years.
@@jansongin2636 I think you misunderstand how postcodes are used generally. They are often used for mail sorting not for final delivery, they are the same as the first part of the eir codes. Many places use the address for final delivery and the code just gets it close. The issue you had was a lack of addressing. There isn't confusion for addressing, suite 4, Level 2, 12 somewere st, sometown, some state, some country, postcode 2747 specifies a property exactly. There can be issues matching an address to a physical location which the database your eir code has *may* help with but also may not. You have the address point set to the centre of the sports field you still don't know where the main pedestrian gate is, or where to deliver the mail to keeping in mind those could be very different places.
Finland had similar system in the olden days. Name, area name and a number, city name. legacy adresses worked for a long time after moving to modern street names. good for relatives that have your old adress only
What3words is a terrible, broken, proprietary, easily misunderstood system whose creators are trying to get rich while putting people’s lives at risk! It uses English words that can be easily misunderstood… something like 70% of the words can be changed by altering a single letter, using plurals, etc and (unlike lat/long) if you get an incorrect w3w your location can be in a completely different place making it a terrible choice in an emergency situations. Plus codes is a much better system to be fair.
W3W is so proprietary and so money-hungry that it isn't viable for universal use. It also has horrible flaws, like "ship wreck shipwreck" and "shipwreck ship wreck" both existing, adding possibility for confusion. People tried to make an open alternative, and it got sued to death by W3W. Avoid those fools.
I just give radically shortened GPS coordinates: 32.7842, -117.1224 don't need any of that city stuff. 4 decimals in is about the resolution to get within 25 feet of where you're aiming. Just because Google maps gives you enough resolution to identify amoeba from space doesn't really mean you need it. Plus it works in Apple maps which...plus codes likely won't anytime soon.
As a fellow Brazilian, I can say that where I live in Spain, addresses can be even crazier. My current address, as an example, is composed by: street/avenue, street door number, block number, staircase number (yes, staircase number), floor number and flat letter (they don't identify flats in numbers like in Brazil, but by letters). This, apart from post code, city and province (we don't have the same thing as "states", but Comunidades Autonomas) It is flabbergasting, to say the least!
My wife is Brazilian, and this is so true. She used to hate getting directions from Americans because they would give her cardinal points (North, East, South, West). She was like, just tell me what I will see when I need to turn.
We never have to use more than just street name, house number and the neighborhood though, even then Maps finds the place without the neighborhood most of the time, and the ZIP code can also replace neighborhood, city and state. Also worth mentioning that we can send a very specific location using the GPS or manually choosing on the map on WhatsApp, then the receiver can just touch it and it opens their Google Maps with the location, that eliminates most of the need for typing out addresses.
I lived in rural Alaska. We had no streets. Everything was addressed to the school or post office. If a form or document required an address, we would either make up a street name or we had a few clever names like "Al Mosta Rd" or "No Rd."
I grew up in the country, in Canada, without house numbers and most roads called something like "Concession 20" so I'm very used to giving my address as a series of landmarks and distances.
Im in Australia, roads between small towns are just called town to town road. Someone who lives at “6350 Dowerin-Meckering Rd” is 6.35km from Dowerin. Their neighbours address might be 6500.
@@bluedogtransportwaWhy not give these roads in-between some short-ish ID than using such names? At least in Europe I believe almost every country has some system for this, why not Australia?
if you are talking about minimizing number of digits then lat long can be easily encoded to some other character set. lat long is just 2 double which is 128 bits of data or 16 bytes. just encode it into a base 20 character set.
The grids are 20x20 which takes 9 bits to encode (2^9=512). Typical plus code addresses are level 5 (meaning 5 grid levels, refers to 13.7m^2 area), so it COULD be stored in just 45 bits; less if you were willing to compress based on 2^9 allowing for 512 possibilities, not 400. Base 20 characters can each encode 5 bits of data, so in theory 9 would be enough, but using 10 digits instead allows each pair of characters (combined, 10 bits, 1 more than needed) to represent one grid level, quite convenient for being able to easily scale precision. It's an elegant system. I'm a fan. Edit: just for fun I was thinking about compression. An L5 plus code fits in 50 bits (a single long, btw!), but we know 5 bits of that go to the inefficiency of the grid system (which is why it's not 45 bits like I originally mentioned). So pure binary gets us down to 45 bits. Now, let's imagine, for the first grid level, we calculate the value from the first 9 bits mod 400. So if the value > 400, we subtract 400 basically. AND if the value > 400, we set the last bit of the final precision level (level 5), so bit #45, to 1. On the second layer of precision we do the same, but setting the previous bit of L5 (#44). Then the same for the next two levels, settings bits #43 and #42. That means that level 5 will only need to include the first 5 bits, and we're now down to 41 bytes. Crucially, this still doesn't get us below 32 bits so this wouldn't likely have any benefits to memory consumption, but it would help if you were trying to pack lots of them into a tight block for storage.
You don't need double precision though (roughly 15 significant digits). Single precision is more than enough. Encoding bits in base 20 is not very practical either, but you could easily make it base 32 (by adding digits and then treat O and 0, S and 5, I and 1 etc as the same character). Let's say you can drop a few bits from the exponent bit of IEEE 754 and use 30 bits for a total of 60, you'd still need 12 characters of seemingly random gibberish. Probably harder to remember than these 😉
The one major problem with this is that they're 2D, not 3D. If you're in a 5 story mall with a subway station underneath and you're trying to find a specific store, you're gonna need some kind of height info.
I mean, this is quite a particular issue and I don't think it was a consideration at all. It would be additional data that has to be part of the algorithm but useless in most cases. Anyhow, OSM sometimes has floor data, Google sometimes has maps for inside of the malls. But realistically, you just go there and look at the map inside of the mall they often have. It isn't that hard.
Honestly if plus codes fixed this they might be an actual improvement over lat&long. Instead it's just a downgrade to cryptic non quickly human deciphered nonsense in favor of bothering to learn the existing perfectly functional system.
For digital orders ideally you would just send coordinates every time, but it's all hidden behind a nice UI. For example a food delivery app could let you enter an address and / or show you a map and you choose the exact location. The driver is gonna use a GPS either way and the ordering system is often integrated to automatically pass the location to the GPS
Bunch of times I'd give coordinates but delivery personel would insist on calling because they don't know how to input coordinates on a navigation application...
@@minecrafter9099I'm as frustrated as the next person with modern device UX, but if you can't handle copy-paste operations, your job security is gonna be pretty grim.
@@Varadiioit is more of issue of mobile design. I can't count how many chatting applications don't allow you to copy particular string of text but only the whole message. Sometimes the GPS navigator is an entirely separate device built into the vehicle and it doesn't allow typing coordinates because of some user-friendliness bs. And often systems in logistics are simply not designed to work with coordinates.
@@pavuk357 Yea, that's fair. I think Doordash/Amazon type drivers are willing to just get it done however. If that means using a personal phone to get a location and set the truck's tracking to whatever closest address, they'd figure that out. I could rant for days about how bad the whole experience is, but the hours wasted on bad ergonomics is universal to nearly every industry now.
I've had times when doing Door Dash orders whilst staying in hospital where if I could have used a plus code to direct the driver to the main entrance of the hospital would have been useful, as for whatever reason their GPS systems sent them around the block or up the street, even when given the official address for the main entrance.
Danish Surveyor here. Coordinations is different, in different coordinate systems. Is it UTM, WGS84 or maybe the Danish DKTM. Then you have to have the software to use it with a gps. Plus codes is great! 🎉
In ham radio we use grid maps, which also let you dice how much precision you want to give, allowing you to give your general area, or specific location. And they're global to earth, not tied to a "region".
As a volunteer firefighter, We need this for our dispatch! In the very rural part of Canada adresses can be weird and many time we ended up on a completely wrong road. (There are notoriously 2 roads with the same name, 20 km apart)
I’ve used Plus Codes for my rural Starlink order on top of 2 other addresses, my rural route address, and the address to the Canada Post drop off office. FedEx ignored it all and just dropped it off at the Canada Post address I put in despite them saying they wouldn’t drop it at a PO Box.
Something similar are QTH locators used in HAM radio. Combination of 2 letters than 2 numbers, 2 letters and so on. The more you add the more specific the location you give someone is.
To achieve roughly 10m precision with Lat, Lon requires only 4 decimals: -50.1234, 100.1234 isn't that bad In degrees minutes seconds format, roughly the same precision is using thirds of seconds: -50 7 24.3, 100 7 24.3
That said... One aspect of single indexes (like plus code, H3, S2) I like is you only have to use one index to group things by location, since two dimensions and the resolution of the grid are compounded into one string. It greatly simplifies working with geospatial data and speeds up queries. Whereas with lat, lon this requires defining two corners of a bounding box, so you have four numbers to define the box vs one string.
1:00 When I was a kid, I used a hand-drawn map on a coffee-stained napkin to walk barefoot to my destination, uphill in the snow, and to get back home, I walked uphill in the dark, with no moon, by joining a pack of wolves and using only my sense of smell to navigate. Now days, kids need GPS to navigate home from their own front-yard.
This will surely help in Georgia. Tbilisi may have 7 exact same names, but all those are different addresses: one of them is a street, the other - boulevard, and so on. Ordering the food was a nightmare there
Unfortunately it seems like Delivery apps like Doordash and Uber Eats convert the Plus Code back into an address if given one, which defeats the main selling point.
Address will be predominantly be used because address are part of the legal system used by governments unless the governments will amend the law to adopt plus codes.
Just use base 36. That's alphanumeric. If you really wanted to use the absurd level of precision used at 1:55 then blue would become 14.T5FRVY63M, E.48132HG21T (I encoded size of the decimal point separately), saving four digits on each. But the example is just absurd. If my math is right, each degree is 69.17mi/111.3km, so to get the same 2.5m precision as plus codes you should only need like 5 decimals. The 15 shown would get you literally nanoscale precision. A more realistic example then would be 40.82238, 14.42889. Using the same base 36 format as before it'd be 14.1RGE, E.X3D. Going even further, we can fix the size of the inputs so we always know where the period is going to be (adding leading zeroes as needed). This would let us drop the period to get it out of the way and make better use of the encoding (it was being wasted on the left side). For this example that takes us to 2FHVI, UXC9. Same level of precision, no need for a city/country to be added on the end.
@@sdmitch16 well, i mean what would be the next base, if youre not gonna use base 12, what's next? base 60?? base 20 seams to be a good amount of characters
@@Oldiesyoungies How would you write in base 60? Where would you get the characters? If everyone recognizes the characters from base 60 and can remember them, then sure.
What about What Three Words? W3W is used by emergency services in the UK - navigating to 3m x 3m squares without involving Google. The only problem with W3W is not fixed with Plus Codes - audio transmission over radio.
What3words is a terrible, broken, proprietary, easily misunderstood system whose creators are trying to get rich while putting people’s lives at risk! It uses English words that can be easily misunderstood… something like 70% of the words can be changed by altering a single letter, using plurals, etc and (unlike lat/long) if you get an incorrect w3w your location can be in a completely different place making it a terrible choice in an emergency situations. Plus codes is a much better system to be fair.
The issue with W3W is they are not an open standard (which also means it can work offline, might I add!) and also they charge mandatory licensing fees to use the system in apps and integrations. If they really cared about saving lives they'd make it free for rescue services, but nah, they gotta pay like everyone else. This is why it did not take off internationally. Google's is a software library you can download and convert GPS coords to + codes back and forth for free. No need for an API, Internet connectivity, or servers.
The coordinates shown at 1:58 are so precise that you are in the order of magnitude, where you could pinpoint specific atoms. In order distinguish between the two houses in the picture, 4 digits after the decimal point would be enough (see also XKCD 2170: Coordinate Precision). The coordinates shown in the picture however are much further apart than the two houses (136 meters) and they point (close) to the top of Mount Vesuvius in Italy. The fact that the algorithm is open source is the key advantage here over What3Words, which (while easier to remember) is entirely proprietary.
Interesting. I’ve seen plus codes before in Google Maps, but I never knew what they were. Now I know. Thanks Linus! This will be very helpful as I am someone who walks and takes public transit everywhere. Sometimes trying to find a place is difficult.
I'd say they re-implemented it. The ergonomics are nicer, but the most important thing is that is that the broader world will never implement a NATO military spec (like MGRS). To the extent that countries don't vilify literally everything western, a simple, open-source system would likely be a lot more palatable.
My address is for the realtor business on the bottom floor. However, my apartment is on the 3rd floor and my entrance is in the rear. There's nearly attached buildings on either side. The only way to the front is around the block. I hate it because they never follow my "street behind buildings" instruction. Unfortunately there aren't any addresses since it's just a "Way," so I can't even cheat it like that. Anyway, yeah, I've had drivers drop off food on the ground in front of a clearly closed-for-the-day business and just leave
Newfoundland here. Rural areas only got proper addresses here about ten years ago ish. And by proper, well...we literally have half addresses sometimes. Like 62.5 where the lot was subdivided and another house built after addresses were assigned.
Meh. As one of those emergency services, they are a pain in the backside to use over the air. Way too many near homophones (especially when heard over radio), pluralised words etc that mean you have to clarify what word was said and often resort to phonetically spelling it. In written form? Great.
@@onix321 yeah but it gives you an exact location…. Otherwise (which I have had in the past)…999 operators crying because they can’t find where the emergency is. 999 operators still ask us to spell things out on the phone.
It looks like just the first 6 digits of latitude and longitude could be sufficient for differentiating from the neighbors house. Arguably shorter than a plus code + city + country.
I once received colloquial written directions from a friend... to visit a place i'd never been too... that included... "and then turn left where the old phone booth used to be..." Thanks mate...
in the UK we have something called what 3 words witch can narrow your location down to 3 meters we can call the emergency serves give them the 3 words and know exility where you are (works with any satnav in the UK)
this could be very relevant in the future if we ever get regular drone delivery. Easy way to make sure it's dropped in the backyard vs the roof or front etc.
I like that Google is implementing smth like this, but did you guys know about "What three words"? It divides the World into 3x3 Meter Blocks and gives each block a combination of 3 Words
What3Words is frustratingly closed source whereas this is seemingly open. It's so annoying because it is more human friendly than these plus codes are when sharing.
@@Adds3000 That is only true as long as you are operating in the same language. Which on top of being closed source makes it less convenient to be used across the globe in multiple languages. Don't get me wrong, I like the system of using 3 words describing a location, but this won't work very well once you operate in a multi lingual space.
@@darkwolf2o79 I think they have 60 languages. So this means every block has 60 diffrent 3 word combinations to describe it. But i don't think that makes it better.
@@darkwolf2o79 Excellent point. Ultimately any of these really come down to adoption so as a user I just need to deal with whichever become the dominant (or just keep using old addresses because non do!)
What3words is a terrible, broken, proprietary, easily misunderstood system whose creators are trying to get rich while putting people’s lives at risk! It uses English words that can be easily misunderstood… something like 70% of the words can be changed by altering a single letter, using plurals, etc and (unlike lat/long) if you get an incorrect w3w your location can be in a completely different place making it a terrible choice in an emergency situations. Plus codes is a much better system to be fair.
That's sufficiently exact to locate one booth among others (farmer's market, conventions, craft fairs) or a specific temporary position for things like food trucks or those very small carts. ATMs, vending machines and even restrooms might be easier to find this way.
Could have also mention What3Words. They basically divide the world in 3x3 meter blocks and just allow you to denominate them with the mention of three words.
Good to know. I will share the plus code with friends next time we trying to find each other in the mall. Just got to long press to get the pin and click the 📌 to find the plus code is one more step than I want Google map to be.
The thing about these codes is that they are proprietary, where a company is privatizing the concept of "where something is". A system like this is good, but this specific system is just a way for more profit, it's not actually good.
I was disappointed not to see any mention of what3words, which has a pretty healthy level of adoption in the UK particularly - our emergency services are trained to accept a what3words reference to dispatch emergency responders to any 3m² location the three word string equates to.
What3words is a terrible, broken, proprietary, easily misunderstood system whose creators are trying to get rich while putting people’s lives at risk! It uses English words that can be easily misunderstood… something like 70% of the words can be changed by altering a single letter, using plurals, etc and (unlike lat/long) if you get an incorrect w3w your location can be in a completely different place making it a terrible choice in an emergency situations. Plus codes is a much better system to be fair.
1:53 And you could shorten those latitude and longitudinal coordinates to four decimal places, making the entire string no longer than the 11-digit Plus Code, and have it be just as relevant. So why is this needed again?
Quite not true. Google Plus Codes were released in 2014. Both standards are like the military grid system. Plus Codes are opensource, you can add the algorithm in any app, and w3w is closed source and you need to pay for a license for the privilege of using It.
Won't change the fact that Amazon uses an intern map app that won't correct errors of locations. So my parcel will always be dropped 10km further randomly next to the city hall, or they will say that they can't find my street (street has been there for +90 years)
Haven't reseached this but i wouldn't be surpised at all if they use Open Street Map as a data source. So maybe take a look whether your location is mapped correctly there. It probably won't fix it immediately because if Amazon uses it, their internal db is only updated ever so often but eventually it might just start working.
While this certainly helps, I don't think this completely solves the problem for two reasons: 1) location is 3D, in densely populated areas, you can have a lot if locations that are councident in longitude and latitude and only differ in elevation (potentially negative for subterranean locations). 2) navigation, you can't generally just proceed in a straight line to a location, so just knowing where something is is often not sufficient to figure out how to get there.
Useful, albeit less so in apartment complexes. Standard addresses will always win in this situation, but Plus Codes are a good way to roughly tell where you are located. Is this not similar to what3words - although this is not Open Source?
w3w wasn't open-source, and had collisions with similar sounding words. As it's entire premise was verbal communication of a location its a pretty terrible implemented of that vision.
what3words isn't only proprietary and closed source but they also charge for their API. That is understandable from a business perspective but an adress system really shouldn't depend on a single company staying afloat.
The geographical coordinates can be short enough and still accurate enough... Basically with only 2 sets of 6 to 7 digits... Hardly longer than a phone number...
When I first saw these, I was traveling in St Maarten and I was a bit confused lol. I actually thought it was how foreign addresses looked. So I didn't really think anything of it because I thought that was just an address. This is interesting and informative.
Nobody screeching about this watched the video where plus codes are being used to help 3rd world countries. Your 3 word app didn't do any of that now did it?
This reminded me back to when I lived in my home country and the address to my home was no joke "the house by the broken yellow and green hydrant, turning at the house of doctor X", despite the fact the hydrant was gone and only the concrete base remained, Doctor X had been dead for like 45 years at that point. Fun times.
what3words is owned by a private company, so I'd guess an app or website would have to pay to access their database? These are open, plus only uses letters, not English words. Or does w3w use different words in each country? So if you look up a place in France, but are in England, would it say dog.red.big but if you were on the French version of the site, would it be chien.rouge.grande ? Does w3w localise?
@@dftfire w3w does not localise no, it's entire global set uses English worlds, unfortunately with collisions for similar sounding words making verbal use pointless.
@@dftfire What3Words does seem to localize depending on your browser language. At least for German. The words you're getting are an entirely diffrent set of words. So a square on the globe has multiple 3 word addresses and the one shown to you depends on your language. If you speak/understand an language it may be easier to remember or tell those 3 words but if you don't it isn't really an improvement because you've got to get the spelling correct and if you'll have to "copy" letters anyway they may as well be as short as possible and nonsensical.
I'm from Brazil and live in a city where they started "giving" these plus codes to people living in unmapped area (myself included... my street has no name). As cool as they are, I have not been able to use them effectivelly, because since they dont replace regular address, and the delivery people doesn't seem to know wtf this code is, I'm never able to get stuff shipped to me....
They are both old; what3words released late 2013 while plus codes released in 2014, and unlike what3words Google plus codes are actually free to use for everyone
Yeah that sounds convenient but the food delivery couriers in my country don't use google maps, they use a local equivalent (yandex maps) and it doesn't support these codes.
Yea… I don’t use google ode any other of the statet maps. But I get that they can be usefull for those specific cases you mentioned altho I really think coordinates are better because more people understand em.
This really does sounds like the MGRS system which also divides the world in a grid pattern, but at the end just uses numbers like it’s a 2d graph, with the option of adding more or less digits for accuracy
I'm not sure if it's still the case, but Starlink wouldn't take lat/long, only plus codes and of course mailing addresses for service locations since its public release.
1:14 When he says Latin American countries calling out land marks, it's no joke. In Nicaragua, traveling with my family, I learned they used land marks that used to be there, but are now gone. I ended up just having someone drop a pin nearby and I would route to the pin and go from there.
Here in argentina we just have street names and every house has a number. I think that's the normal way
@@lifdrazor yeah, except if you dont live in a big city.. houses have addresses, but mine was only known as the house near ortigoza, behind the red truck
l
colombia depending on the city it varies, the big ones do use addresses but smaller ones like cartagena, there are addresses but nobody uses them, instead you tell 'yeah neighborhood x, near the supermarket' or "do you know how to get to Y?", "follow my directions"
etc etc.
@@lifdrazorThe real trouble comes with growth - without careful planning, a NW street can become SE with a different numbering system when a city becomes a suburb.
5:15 former FedEx address finder here (no, not a driver) if you don’t know your address PLEASE scribble your plus code in the address field. Writing gibberish, your email, your phone number, or an address you’re not sure is correct slows us down. If you really don’t know where you’re sending your package to, email is best.
How can someone think they can send a package to someone without knowing their address?
@@mynameisben123 see, I thought the exact same thing as you, and I couldn’t even fathom trying to send a package somewhere that doesn’t exist. The reality is, there are a lot of people that don’t double check their shipping information, then on top of that there’s another layer of automated systems that will sometimes break it or mangle weirdly formatted addresses, people who sincerely don’t understand that if you live in an apartment complex/building, you need to add that to your address info.
And then even on top of that, there are the people who are confidently wrong, and insist you’re wrong about their address, even if it’s one that isn’t possible (think a 2000 address on a street that only goes up to 800’s) and will argue with you until you piece together enough clues from them that you can describe their house from aerial imagery, or street view.
@@mynameisben123possibly scammers or people don't have a good address?
"If you really don’t know where you’re sending your package to" then stop, why are you sending a package in the first place.
@@iris4547 a lot of businesses have confusing addresses especially in huge buildings where the specific entrance/gate matters
In Australia we have an app for emergency services. If you call via the app it sends all the information with your call. The app uses GPS, Closest Address, Nearest Cross Streets and What Three Words to help dispatch emergency services to your exact location. It helps a lot in regional areas where you can be a long way from the address.
Trying to use the what 3 words thing in marginal signal is not as smooth an experience as you'd think, especially when there's limited vocabulary or accents involved.
@@zyeborm I can't say I've ever had an issue the few times I've used it but good to know.
1:53, this is only partially true, to be fair.
XKCD #2170 is highly relevant here. 3 decimals is probably sufficient to point out the location, 4 if you also want to point out where the door is. More than so is just silly.
And based on the example shown with the blue and orange house, it's quite obvious just looking at the numbers that (40.822, 14.429) and (40.823,14.428) ought to have been sufficient instead of that whole mess of redundant precision where you want the pin accurate to the nearest atom.
Not to say that the plus codes aren't more user friendly (they definitely are), but traditional coordinates really don't HAVE to be that absurdly long and unwieldy as the example shown.
The examples are highly misleading, which is the one thing an example shouldn't be
Funfact, the example coordinates lead to a specific atom in a grain of dust dangerously close to the crater of the vesuv vulcano
XKCD 927 also applies, both the latlon coordinate system and a dozen other map grid and coordinate systems already exist. I'm partial to the Military Grid Reference System since that's what I've used the most.
This XKCD is totally false and misleading! I was pinpointing data center location very recently, and less than 5 digits was highly inaccurate to pinpoint the building! Let alone door...
@@jasondmI definitely agree about MGRS. It's nice to be able to easily choose how precise you want to be
what3words does the same since 2013, but with 3 normal words instead of a random cryptic code.
Does it work with google and Apple Maps?
@@Clickworker101The real question is do plus codes work anywhere outside Google?
At least these plus-codes are open-source and unlikely to have collisions with similar sounding words.
what3words isn't perfect, though.
Sometimes places that are near enough can use the same words, so for things like rescues, teams have been sent to the wrong place.
And it's not an open-standard, but owned by a private company. So I'm guessing there are fees to pay somewhere, such as to implement it in your own app, or to request specific words be used or not for a location you own?
w3w is English only. Plus codes at least works with al languages using Latin script.
I called 911 to report to the police a hit and run recently, and it threw me for a loop when they asked for an address....like, no, I don't have a freaking address, have no idea where the heck I am, my car is totalled in the middle of a suburban street, across from a Chinese restaurant that I can't read because it's in Chinese. Best I can do is give you is the two major intersections 1.5 minute drive away from here.
I hope they catch the loser that did that to you, and that everything works out with your insurance to cover your vehicle needs.
I swear polices DO know most of the time where are you calling from
Quite a few 911 services in Canada can use what3words addresses now.
@@lifdrazor They can triangulate the location of the phone doing the calling to within a few hundred meters.
@@TheRealSkeletor yeah, so unless there are next to no antennas.. that dispatcher was just being annoying on purpose
Ireland was one of the last advanced countries to get postcodes in 2014 or something, but when we finally got them there was a per-household code, so no general area or general building nonsense and confusion about basements or specific apartments.
It was a total mess before in the countryside. It was name, area (sometimes), township. Thats it. Even worse is because of generations of farm subdivisions about 7 houses share my surname in my area. The postman (who also was a relative) had to know everyone's names and children's names in our 2 square mile area because we all had the same name and address. Repeat this in every area along his route with 20 people with the same name and address in their area.
Madness. Every time he went on holiday it was chaos.
That and ranked choice voting are one of the few steps in the right direction we made in recent years.
I have to agree eircodes are the best
@@jansongin2636 I think you misunderstand how postcodes are used generally. They are often used for mail sorting not for final delivery, they are the same as the first part of the eir codes. Many places use the address for final delivery and the code just gets it close. The issue you had was a lack of addressing. There isn't confusion for addressing, suite 4, Level 2, 12 somewere st, sometown, some state, some country, postcode 2747 specifies a property exactly. There can be issues matching an address to a physical location which the database your eir code has *may* help with but also may not. You have the address point set to the centre of the sports field you still don't know where the main pedestrian gate is, or where to deliver the mail to keeping in mind those could be very different places.
Ireland is the size of Utah and you have issues getting your mail.... 😂
Finland had similar system in the olden days. Name, area name and a number, city name. legacy adresses worked for a long time after moving to modern street names. good for relatives that have your old adress only
Posties won’t use eircodes. But they are very useful in my work
In the UK, public services are pushing what3words instead.... that's if you don't also use the geolocation sharing on the call that they can use
What3words is a terrible, broken, proprietary, easily misunderstood system whose creators are trying to get rich while putting people’s lives at risk! It uses English words that can be easily misunderstood… something like 70% of the words can be changed by altering a single letter, using plurals, etc and (unlike lat/long) if you get an incorrect w3w your location can be in a completely different place making it a terrible choice in an emergency situations. Plus codes is a much better system to be fair.
They will also accept plus codes
I guess w3w have good sales team.
@@colinnichit's free to use for the public and emergency services. I imagine they push it for general public use as it's simpler to understand.
W3W is so proprietary and so money-hungry that it isn't viable for universal use. It also has horrible flaws, like "ship wreck shipwreck" and "shipwreck ship wreck" both existing, adding possibility for confusion. People tried to make an open alternative, and it got sued to death by W3W. Avoid those fools.
I just give radically shortened GPS coordinates: 32.7842, -117.1224 don't need any of that city stuff. 4 decimals in is about the resolution to get within 25 feet of where you're aiming. Just because Google maps gives you enough resolution to identify amoeba from space doesn't really mean you need it. Plus it works in Apple maps which...plus codes likely won't anytime soon.
Take a look at Brazilian adresses, they’re crazy long: street name, neighborhood name, block number and then house number.
In India it can be house number, street number/name, neighbourhood name, subdivision of city, city, and finally post office code.
As a fellow Brazilian, I can say that where I live in Spain, addresses can be even crazier. My current address, as an example, is composed by: street/avenue, street door number, block number, staircase number (yes, staircase number), floor number and flat letter (they don't identify flats in numbers like in Brazil, but by letters). This, apart from post code, city and province (we don't have the same thing as "states", but Comunidades Autonomas)
It is flabbergasting, to say the least!
My wife is Brazilian, and this is so true. She used to hate getting directions from Americans because they would give her cardinal points (North, East, South, West). She was like, just tell me what I will see when I need to turn.
in portugal its: Street, neighborhood, house number, postal code, city, (and sometimes, district and country)
We never have to use more than just street name, house number and the neighborhood though, even then Maps finds the place without the neighborhood most of the time, and the ZIP code can also replace neighborhood, city and state.
Also worth mentioning that we can send a very specific location using the GPS or manually choosing on the map on WhatsApp, then the receiver can just touch it and it opens their Google Maps with the location, that eliminates most of the need for typing out addresses.
I lived in rural Alaska. We had no streets. Everything was addressed to the school or post office. If a form or document required an address, we would either make up a street name or we had a few clever names like "Al Mosta Rd" or "No Rd."
I grew up in the country, in Canada, without house numbers and most roads called something like "Concession 20" so I'm very used to giving my address as a series of landmarks and distances.
And if you're in the prairies, DLS has been around since the 1870s, and is still used today for rural properties.
Im in Australia, roads between small towns are just called town to town road.
Someone who lives at “6350 Dowerin-Meckering Rd” is 6.35km from Dowerin. Their neighbours address might be 6500.
@@bluedogtransportwaIf only suburban roads all correspond to distance from one known end, like how *most* North American freeways number their exits.
@@Henchman1977 It was fun, you could easily have several people with the same name and address living in different homes.
@@bluedogtransportwaWhy not give these roads in-between some short-ish ID than using such names? At least in Europe I believe almost every country has some system for this, why not Australia?
if you are talking about minimizing number of digits then lat long can be easily encoded to some other character set. lat long is just 2 double which is 128 bits of data or 16 bytes. just encode it into a base 20 character set.
That's almost exactly how Plus Codes are implemented, behind the scenes.
The grids are 20x20 which takes 9 bits to encode (2^9=512). Typical plus code addresses are level 5 (meaning 5 grid levels, refers to 13.7m^2 area), so it COULD be stored in just 45 bits; less if you were willing to compress based on 2^9 allowing for 512 possibilities, not 400.
Base 20 characters can each encode 5 bits of data, so in theory 9 would be enough, but using 10 digits instead allows each pair of characters (combined, 10 bits, 1 more than needed) to represent one grid level, quite convenient for being able to easily scale precision.
It's an elegant system. I'm a fan.
Edit: just for fun I was thinking about compression. An L5 plus code fits in 50 bits (a single long, btw!), but we know 5 bits of that go to the inefficiency of the grid system (which is why it's not 45 bits like I originally mentioned).
So pure binary gets us down to 45 bits. Now, let's imagine, for the first grid level, we calculate the value from the first 9 bits mod 400. So if the value > 400, we subtract 400 basically. AND if the value > 400, we set the last bit of the final precision level (level 5), so bit #45, to 1.
On the second layer of precision we do the same, but setting the previous bit of L5 (#44). Then the same for the next two levels, settings bits #43 and #42. That means that level 5 will only need to include the first 5 bits, and we're now down to 41 bytes.
Crucially, this still doesn't get us below 32 bits so this wouldn't likely have any benefits to memory consumption, but it would help if you were trying to pack lots of them into a tight block for storage.
@@StevenDirth with the added benefit of pointless branding! /s
This is how plus codes work.
You don't need double precision though (roughly 15 significant digits). Single precision is more than enough. Encoding bits in base 20 is not very practical either, but you could easily make it base 32 (by adding digits and then treat O and 0, S and 5, I and 1 etc as the same character). Let's say you can drop a few bits from the exponent bit of IEEE 754 and use 30 bits for a total of 60, you'd still need 12 characters of seemingly random gibberish. Probably harder to remember than these 😉
The one major problem with this is that they're 2D, not 3D. If you're in a 5 story mall with a subway station underneath and you're trying to find a specific store, you're gonna need some kind of height info.
I mean, this is quite a particular issue and I don't think it was a consideration at all. It would be additional data that has to be part of the algorithm but useless in most cases. Anyhow, OSM sometimes has floor data, Google sometimes has maps for inside of the malls. But realistically, you just go there and look at the map inside of the mall they often have. It isn't that hard.
Give elevation above sea level.
Well.. most 3D structures are buildings with floors. So specifying the floor number would suffice.
Honestly if plus codes fixed this they might be an actual improvement over lat&long. Instead it's just a downgrade to cryptic non quickly human deciphered nonsense in favor of bothering to learn the existing perfectly functional system.
@@pavuk357 If it's being pitched as a solution to the current coordinate/address system, it should probably fix the problem of the Z-axis as well.
For digital orders ideally you would just send coordinates every time, but it's all hidden behind a nice UI. For example a food delivery app could let you enter an address and / or show you a map and you choose the exact location. The driver is gonna use a GPS either way and the ordering system is often integrated to automatically pass the location to the GPS
Bunch of times I'd give coordinates but delivery personel would insist on calling because they don't know how to input coordinates on a navigation application...
@@minecrafter9099I'm as frustrated as the next person with modern device UX, but if you can't handle copy-paste operations, your job security is gonna be pretty grim.
@@Varadiioit is more of issue of mobile design. I can't count how many chatting applications don't allow you to copy particular string of text but only the whole message. Sometimes the GPS navigator is an entirely separate device built into the vehicle and it doesn't allow typing coordinates because of some user-friendliness bs. And often systems in logistics are simply not designed to work with coordinates.
@@pavuk357 Yea, that's fair. I think Doordash/Amazon type drivers are willing to just get it done however. If that means using a personal phone to get a location and set the truck's tracking to whatever closest address, they'd figure that out.
I could rant for days about how bad the whole experience is, but the hours wasted on bad ergonomics is universal to nearly every industry now.
I've had times when doing Door Dash orders whilst staying in hospital where if I could have used a plus code to direct the driver to the main entrance of the hospital would have been useful, as for whatever reason their GPS systems sent them around the block or up the street, even when given the official address for the main entrance.
In Australia "What 3 Words" has being used since its inception for Emergency Service Response and Australian Postal Deliveries.
Danish Surveyor here.
Coordinations is different, in different coordinate systems. Is it UTM, WGS84 or maybe the Danish DKTM. Then you have to have the software to use it with a gps.
Plus codes is great! 🎉
@1:30
Hey, that's in my neck of the woods.
We pronounce it "Boot jack" to not be offensive
Boot jack, now here
In ham radio we use grid maps, which also let you dice how much precision you want to give, allowing you to give your general area, or specific location. And they're global to earth, not tied to a "region".
As a volunteer firefighter, We need this for our dispatch!
In the very rural part of Canada adresses can be weird and many time we ended up on a completely wrong road. (There are notoriously 2 roads with the same name, 20 km apart)
I didn't know about plus codes at all, very interesting. Also love that you mentionned FOSS Organic Maps and OsmAnd!
I’ve used Plus Codes for my rural Starlink order on top of 2 other addresses, my rural route address, and the address to the Canada Post drop off office. FedEx ignored it all and just dropped it off at the Canada Post address I put in despite them saying they wouldn’t drop it at a PO Box.
Something similar are QTH locators used in HAM radio. Combination of 2 letters than 2 numbers, 2 letters and so on. The more you add the more specific the location you give someone is.
The ending has only planted the temptation in my mind to put a plus code on a package and see what happens
Yep!
When i tried the code at 2:44, I was sent to a random mountain in Northern Sweden close to the border with Norway
Did you include the city? The code is not globally unique, it must be used with the city.
What 3 words is so much better. 💁♂️
To achieve roughly 10m precision with Lat, Lon requires only 4 decimals: -50.1234, 100.1234 isn't that bad
In degrees minutes seconds format, roughly the same precision is using thirds of seconds:
-50 7 24.3, 100 7 24.3
That said... One aspect of single indexes (like plus code, H3, S2) I like is you only have to use one index to group things by location, since two dimensions and the resolution of the grid are compounded into one string. It greatly simplifies working with geospatial data and speeds up queries.
Whereas with lat, lon this requires defining two corners of a bounding box, so you have four numbers to define the box vs one string.
1:00 When I was a kid, I used a hand-drawn map on a coffee-stained napkin to walk barefoot to my destination, uphill in the snow, and to get back home, I walked uphill in the dark, with no moon, by joining a pack of wolves and using only my sense of smell to navigate. Now days, kids need GPS to navigate home from their own front-yard.
Grandpa?? Is that you?
@@MoonBunnyLovers Nah that’s Mowgli
@@Zomboy4313 Depends. Was he being chased by a Tiger the whole time?
Welcome to the future. Things will keep changing so don't bother and enjoy your retirement.
So they coopted the MGRS (Military Grid Reference System) and modified it slightly.
This will surely help in Georgia. Tbilisi may have 7 exact same names, but all those are different addresses: one of them is a street, the other - boulevard, and so on. Ordering the food was a nightmare there
Unfortunately it seems like Delivery apps like Doordash and Uber Eats convert the Plus Code back into an address if given one, which defeats the main selling point.
Don't you have a chat or something like that, you can tag it in that...
Address will be predominantly be used because address are part of the legal system used by governments unless the governments will amend the law to adopt plus codes.
latidude and logitude may be a good case study for using base 12.... or even base 20..
pluscodes (open location codes) are base 20
Just use base 36. That's alphanumeric. If you really wanted to use the absurd level of precision used at 1:55 then blue would become 14.T5FRVY63M, E.48132HG21T (I encoded size of the decimal point separately), saving four digits on each.
But the example is just absurd. If my math is right, each degree is 69.17mi/111.3km, so to get the same 2.5m precision as plus codes you should only need like 5 decimals. The 15 shown would get you literally nanoscale precision.
A more realistic example then would be 40.82238, 14.42889. Using the same base 36 format as before it'd be 14.1RGE, E.X3D.
Going even further, we can fix the size of the inputs so we always know where the period is going to be (adding leading zeroes as needed). This would let us drop the period to get it out of the way and make better use of the encoding (it was being wasted on the left side). For this example that takes us to 2FHVI, UXC9. Same level of precision, no need for a city/country to be added on the end.
What advantages does base 20 have over base 36 or a slightly smaller base number that excludes similar looking characters?
@@sdmitch16 well, i mean what would be the next base, if youre not gonna use base 12, what's next? base 60?? base 20 seams to be a good amount of characters
@@Oldiesyoungies How would you write in base 60? Where would you get the characters? If everyone recognizes the characters from base 60 and can remember them, then sure.
What about What Three Words? W3W is used by emergency services in the UK - navigating to 3m x 3m squares without involving Google.
The only problem with W3W is not fixed with Plus Codes - audio transmission over radio.
What3words is a terrible, broken, proprietary, easily misunderstood system whose creators are trying to get rich while putting people’s lives at risk! It uses English words that can be easily misunderstood… something like 70% of the words can be changed by altering a single letter, using plurals, etc and (unlike lat/long) if you get an incorrect w3w your location can be in a completely different place making it a terrible choice in an emergency situations. Plus codes is a much better system to be fair.
At least I can remember what 3 words and they can be relayed over the phone easier.
The issue with W3W is they are not an open standard (which also means it can work offline, might I add!) and also they charge mandatory licensing fees to use the system in apps and integrations. If they really cared about saving lives they'd make it free for rescue services, but nah, they gotta pay like everyone else. This is why it did not take off internationally.
Google's is a software library you can download and convert GPS coords to + codes back and forth for free. No need for an API, Internet connectivity, or servers.
@@AlanFregtman And how long before Google does a Google and kills off the service?
@@benketteridge9150 It's an open source standard, you don't need google for it at all.
The coordinates shown at 1:58 are so precise that you are in the order of magnitude, where you could pinpoint specific atoms. In order distinguish between the two houses in the picture, 4 digits after the decimal point would be enough (see also XKCD 2170: Coordinate Precision). The coordinates shown in the picture however are much further apart than the two houses (136 meters) and they point (close) to the top of Mount Vesuvius in Italy.
The fact that the algorithm is open source is the key advantage here over What3Words, which (while easier to remember) is entirely proprietary.
Thing is, this REQUIRES a device, whereas traditional addresses do not.
Addresses require devices, too, if you aren't familiar with the area, even if that device is a paper map.
0:56 Rua Torta! Brazil mentioned (implicitly). Nice
4:52 - time to listen to some Rezz now
Interesting. I’ve seen plus codes before in Google Maps, but I never knew what they were. Now I know. Thanks Linus! This will be very helpful as I am someone who walks and takes public transit everywhere. Sometimes trying to find a place is difficult.
So... Google reinvented the Military Grid Reference System. Neat.
I'd say they re-implemented it. The ergonomics are nicer, but the most important thing is that is that the broader world will never implement a NATO military spec (like MGRS). To the extent that countries don't vilify literally everything western, a simple, open-source system would likely be a lot more palatable.
"Just don't make it obvious."
Well It's a implementation of It, of course. But Google released It way back in 2014, so It's nothing new
Good ol MGRS lol. I still have the MGRS and UTM app even though I’m not army anymore lol
well they dont share so were all bfing our selves
This is the first time hearing of this. And I am grateful for the information
Just have to get food delivery apps to support this and maybe they'll stop delivering my lunch to my neighbour.
my local online shops like shopee and tokopedia allow me to pin my exact location on the gmap, I thought this is a norm for amazon and the likes
My address is for the realtor business on the bottom floor. However, my apartment is on the 3rd floor and my entrance is in the rear. There's nearly attached buildings on either side. The only way to the front is around the block. I hate it because they never follow my "street behind buildings" instruction. Unfortunately there aren't any addresses since it's just a "Way," so I can't even cheat it like that.
Anyway, yeah, I've had drivers drop off food on the ground in front of a clearly closed-for-the-day business and just leave
They already support it.
Genuinely never hear Google was doing this. So glad I learned about it
Google: Hey I didn't do my homework last night. Can I copy yours?
MGRS: Yea just change it slightly so they don't know you copied off me.
Newfoundland here. Rural areas only got proper addresses here about ten years ago ish. And by proper, well...we literally have half addresses sometimes. Like 62.5 where the lot was subdivided and another house built after addresses were assigned.
What 3 Words... far superior in every way... already used a lot in the UK by our emergency services.
Abso-bloody-lutely
Meh. As one of those emergency services, they are a pain in the backside to use over the air. Way too many near homophones (especially when heard over radio), pluralised words etc that mean you have to clarify what word was said and often resort to phonetically spelling it. In written form? Great.
I used to think that Islamabad (capital of Pakistan) has amazing addressing system, unless I saw Hong Kong.... Each building has a unique name
@@onix321 yeah but it gives you an exact location…. Otherwise (which I have had in the past)…999 operators crying because they can’t find where the emergency is. 999 operators still ask us to spell things out on the phone.
I was just about to say that there was something that's much better. Thanks for reminding me of the name.
It looks like just the first 6 digits of latitude and longitude could be sufficient for differentiating from the neighbors house. Arguably shorter than a plus code + city + country.
So almost like an MGRS?
Latitude and longitude is within about a meter (3 feet) with only 5 decimal places.
4:07 Kolkata mentioned 🗣️
But at what cost.....???🥲😓
you poo in the street 😂😂😂
I once received colloquial written directions from a friend... to visit a place i'd never been too... that included... "and then turn left where the old phone booth used to be..." Thanks mate...
in the UK we have something called what 3 words witch can narrow your location down to 3 meters
we can call the emergency serves give them the 3 words and know exility where you are (works with any satnav in the UK)
this could be very relevant in the future if we ever get regular drone delivery. Easy way to make sure it's dropped in the backyard vs the roof or front etc.
I like that Google is implementing smth like this, but did you guys know about "What three words"? It divides the World into 3x3 Meter Blocks and gives each block a combination of 3 Words
What3Words is frustratingly closed source whereas this is seemingly open. It's so annoying because it is more human friendly than these plus codes are when sharing.
@@Adds3000 That is only true as long as you are operating in the same language. Which on top of being closed source makes it less convenient to be used across the globe in multiple languages. Don't get me wrong, I like the system of using 3 words describing a location, but this won't work very well once you operate in a multi lingual space.
@@darkwolf2o79 I think they have 60 languages. So this means every block has 60 diffrent 3 word combinations to describe it. But i don't think that makes it better.
@@darkwolf2o79 Excellent point. Ultimately any of these really come down to adoption so as a user I just need to deal with whichever become the dominant (or just keep using old addresses because non do!)
What3words is a terrible, broken, proprietary, easily misunderstood system whose creators are trying to get rich while putting people’s lives at risk! It uses English words that can be easily misunderstood… something like 70% of the words can be changed by altering a single letter, using plurals, etc and (unlike lat/long) if you get an incorrect w3w your location can be in a completely different place making it a terrible choice in an emergency situations. Plus codes is a much better system to be fair.
Already use it for FPV-Drones. Typing in a Plus code from the last location (after a crash) is much quicker than latitude and longitude
0:04 Im honored you pronounced souvlaki correctly 😂
Plus codes are also widely used for Starlink services since many people using starlink don’t have an address.
the door slam at 2:52 made me laugh so hard , omg the slam was so loud
That's sufficiently exact to locate one booth among others (farmer's market, conventions, craft fairs) or a specific temporary position for things like food trucks or those very small carts. ATMs, vending machines and even restrooms might be easier to find this way.
"What 3 words" also does a similar thing, works well I'd say
what3words might be the best. I have yet to come across a more elegant solution.
1:53
5 or 6 digits after the decimal point would have sufficed, with 14 digits you're down to a precision of 0.000000000000000001 metres
If the example is anything to go by, 3 decimals would suffice.
@0:43 Stop leaking your address dude!
Never heard of them before, but being open source and thus truly available to everyone is pretty sweet.
Could have also mention What3Words. They basically divide the world in 3x3 meter blocks and just allow you to denominate them with the mention of three words.
It’s kind of similar to the Maidenhead Locator System used by HAM radio operators, but much more detailed.
In Germany often are identical streetnames in one City. Madness! Good Luck Emergency Services!
Where?
Hab ich noch nie gesehen
Good to know. I will share the plus code with friends next time we trying to find each other in the mall. Just got to long press to get the pin and click the 📌 to find the plus code is one more step than I want Google map to be.
The thing about these codes is that they are proprietary, where a company is privatizing the concept of "where something is".
A system like this is good, but this specific system is just a way for more profit, it's not actually good.
He said it was open source. You can copy it and create your own app
It's open source.
I've been adding the plus code to my delivery addresses for a while now and I've seen that the companies drop off my packages faster.
I was disappointed not to see any mention of what3words, which has a pretty healthy level of adoption in the UK particularly - our emergency services are trained to accept a what3words reference to dispatch emergency responders to any 3m² location the three word string equates to.
What3words is a terrible, broken, proprietary, easily misunderstood system whose creators are trying to get rich while putting people’s lives at risk! It uses English words that can be easily misunderstood… something like 70% of the words can be changed by altering a single letter, using plurals, etc and (unlike lat/long) if you get an incorrect w3w your location can be in a completely different place making it a terrible choice in an emergency situations. Plus codes is a much better system to be fair.
the thing is if this is about privacy it doesn't really protect information it just makes it shorter and consistent
5:14 Gary left LTT LABS to go work at Gino's Restaurant!!!!
1:53 And you could shorten those latitude and longitudinal coordinates to four decimal places, making the entire string no longer than the 11-digit Plus Code, and have it be just as relevant.
So why is this needed again?
So google ripped off the app What 3 words
Aye. I'll be sticking with what3words, far more fun
At least these plus-codes are open-source and unlikely to have collisions with similar sounding words.
@@paulsmith2363another comment said that what three words actually cost money for anyone to use it outside of a personal capacity?
Quite not true. Google Plus Codes were released in 2014. Both standards are like the military grid system.
Plus Codes are opensource, you can add the algorithm in any app, and w3w is closed source and you need to pay for a license for the privilege of using It.
Won't change the fact that Amazon uses an intern map app that won't correct errors of locations.
So my parcel will always be dropped 10km further randomly next to the city hall, or they will say that they can't find my street (street has been there for +90 years)
Haven't reseached this but i wouldn't be surpised at all if they use Open Street Map as a data source. So maybe take a look whether your location is mapped correctly there. It probably won't fix it immediately because if Amazon uses it, their internal db is only updated ever so often but eventually it might just start working.
So, what3words then ... 😅
While this certainly helps, I don't think this completely solves the problem for two reasons:
1) location is 3D, in densely populated areas, you can have a lot if locations that are councident in longitude and latitude and only differ in elevation (potentially negative for subterranean locations).
2) navigation, you can't generally just proceed in a straight line to a location, so just knowing where something is is often not sufficient to figure out how to get there.
Useful, albeit less so in apartment complexes. Standard addresses will always win in this situation, but Plus Codes are a good way to roughly tell where you are located. Is this not similar to what3words - although this is not Open Source?
w3w wasn't open-source, and had collisions with similar sounding words. As it's entire premise was verbal communication of a location its a pretty terrible implemented of that vision.
what3words isn't only proprietary and closed source but they also charge for their API. That is understandable from a business perspective but an adress system really shouldn't depend on a single company staying afloat.
The geographical coordinates can be short enough and still accurate enough... Basically with only 2 sets of 6 to 7 digits... Hardly longer than a phone number...
aint this just what3words but different
I thought the same!
At least these plus-codes are open-source and unlikely to have collisions with similar sounding words.
@@EvaX3c but worse. As you might remember 3 words but 6 random characters maybe not so much
When I first saw these, I was traveling in St Maarten and I was a bit confused lol. I actually thought it was how foreign addresses looked. So I didn't really think anything of it because I thought that was just an address.
This is interesting and informative.
What Three Words is surely a better solution, these plus codes are not very memorable or intuitive.
Three words is only more memorable if you speak English. Not as useful if it's trying to be a global address database
At least these plus-codes are open-source and unlikely to have collisions with similar sounding words.
@@nonfelem It's still using only Latin Script though.
@@alzukeyYou're never going to get something that crosses language barriers. This is still closer to universal than three English words.
Nobody screeching about this watched the video where plus codes are being used to help 3rd world countries. Your 3 word app didn't do any of that now did it?
This reminded me back to when I lived in my home country and the address to my home was no joke "the house by the broken yellow and green hydrant, turning at the house of doctor X", despite the fact the hydrant was gone and only the concrete base remained, Doctor X had been dead for like 45 years at that point. Fun times.
Nobody at LTT knew about what3words?
This would help a TON with alarm monitoring dispatches.
Doesn’t what three words do this?
At least these plus-codes are open-source and unlikely to have collisions with similar sounding words.
what3words is owned by a private company, so I'd guess an app or website would have to pay to access their database?
These are open, plus only uses letters, not English words. Or does w3w use different words in each country? So if you look up a place in France, but are in England, would it say dog.red.big but if you were on the French version of the site, would it be chien.rouge.grande ? Does w3w localise?
@@dftfire w3w does not localise no, it's entire global set uses English worlds, unfortunately with collisions for similar sounding words making verbal use pointless.
@@dftfire What3Words does seem to localize depending on your browser language. At least for German. The words you're getting are an entirely diffrent set of words. So a square on the globe has multiple 3 word addresses and the one shown to you depends on your language.
If you speak/understand an language it may be easier to remember or tell those 3 words but if you don't it isn't really an improvement because you've got to get the spelling correct and if you'll have to "copy" letters anyway they may as well be as short as possible and nonsensical.
I'm from Brazil and live in a city where they started "giving" these plus codes to people living in unmapped area (myself included... my street has no name).
As cool as they are, I have not been able to use them effectivelly, because since they dont replace regular address, and the delivery people doesn't seem to know wtf this code is, I'm never able to get stuff shipped to me....
So google has finally figured out how to rip-off what3words?
They are both old; what3words released late 2013 while plus codes released in 2014, and unlike what3words Google plus codes are actually free to use for everyone
Yeah that sounds convenient but the food delivery couriers in my country don't use google maps, they use a local equivalent (yandex maps) and it doesn't support these codes.
And if you don't have mobile Internet you're screwed...
Offline maps are a thing and totally free
I assume this system still works without that
Plus Codes work offline.
Would love if this could also include altitude or floor levels for places like multistorey buildings, tunnels and bridges.
take my address and like it
Yea… I don’t use google ode any other of the statet maps. But I get that they can be usefull for those specific cases you mentioned altho I really think coordinates are better because more people understand em.
.what 3 words already exists
This really does sounds like the MGRS system which also divides the world in a grid pattern, but at the end just uses numbers like it’s a 2d graph, with the option of adding more or less digits for accuracy
I'm not sure if it's still the case, but Starlink wouldn't take lat/long, only plus codes and of course mailing addresses for service locations since its public release.
Plus codes played a part in my research paper on rural paramedicine 😃
lol you mention the use in rural ems at 1:30. Should have watched the full thing
Omg, how long has this existed? This is super useful!
I feel like we already have a Geolocation code... something about drawing circles around the world
I feel like this title was misleading clickbait but technically it wasn't. I feel both impressed and used.
I like how some places in the world, a hand drawn map to your house is a valid address