Monday, July 11, 2016

What 3 F*cks


There is something about the popular location coding system what3words which makes it a popular target for parody maps.

what3words divides the world into 57 trillion 3 x 3 meter squares. Each of those squares is uniquely identified with a three word address. This means that you can share your location anywhere in the world using just three words.

The simplicity of this location coding system has been parodied already by what3emojis and what3pictures. Now we have what3fucks. what3fucks works in a similar way to what3words - in that it allows you to get a short memorable address for any location in the world. The major difference is that what3fucks only uses swear words.

what3fucks uses a octahedral quaternary triangular mesh to divide the world into tiny triangles. Using this system the world is kind of turned into a massive planet sized die - with each triangle given a unique number. what3fucks just transposes each of the individual digits in that number into a specific swear word.


If what3fucks is too rude for your particular needs then you could use what3emojis instead. what3emojis is a revolutionary new way of addressing the entire world using the only common language of the entire human race, the emoji.

With what3emojis the Earth is divided into 4m x 4m squares which are randomly assigned a unique three-emoji combination. If you want to share your location with someone else all you need to do is share the three emojis assigned to that location.


If you don't like emojis then you might want to give what3pictures a try. what3pictures uses the what3words API in conjunction with the Google Image Search API to create a global location coding system that uses easy to recognize pictures.

The application works by taking the three words from an address provided by what3words and finding the most commonly searched images for each of those words in Google. Now, to share your location, all you have to do is cut & paste those images into a text or e-mail and then hope that your friends can guess the correct word for each of the images.

1 comment:

  1. So wanted this to be an actual thing:-)

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