A look at What3words, a location sharing app that divides the world into 57 trillion three meter squares, and assigns them a unique, random three-word address
Context & Ripple Effects
The BBC's explainer on What3words lands in the middle of a run of coverage on location apps, but it profiles a different layer of the stack. Where Citizen notifies users of crimes nearby and Companion let friends digitally walk you home, What3words is addressing infrastructure: 57 trillion three-meter squares, each with a unique random three-word address, so any point on Earth can be spoken, texted, or remembered without a street address.
That distinction matters because the surrounding coverage shows location sharing becoming a social default — Find My and similar apps are now a staple of young people's friendships — while precise, human-readable coordinates remain a gap the street-address system never filled. What3words is positioning itself as the missing vocabulary for that gap.
First-order effects
- Users gain a way to communicate exact positions — remote trails, building entrances, disaster sites — where conventional addresses are absent or ambiguous, sharing them through any channel that carries three words.
Second-order effects
- The app slots into the location-sharing ecosystem covered alongside it rather than competing with it: safety and social apps like Companion, Citizen, and Find My handle who to share with, and a three-word address gives them a precision layer for the where.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern in this coverage holds — location sharing normalizing from emergency use toward everyday social habit (as the 2022 Find My reporting shows) — precise addressing becomes ambient infrastructure, and the trade-off the NYT flagged about privacy lines blurring applies to any system that makes pinpoint location easier to broadcast.
The trend: Consumer location apps are converging from coarse proximity (nearby alerts, friend tracking) toward exact-point addressing, with What3words supplying the human-readable layer the coordinate and street-address systems lack.