> Contexts - A context is a place where I have data about myself, such as an account on a site or service, or in some desktop app, on my phone, or even from a device.
This part doesn't feel appropriately named. The place a data is stored should be a 'Location' or a 'Destination'. A 'Context' might be a better name for where that data is used to express a bigger idea than just itself.
For example, I would look to my phone as a Destination for my contacts and these contacts showing up next to an event i'm going to with others as a Context. This feels more intuitive to me. I know I'm splitting hairs, but would love your opinions.
All that aside, really love this idea! Happy to see people becoming more aware of these issues and finding interesting solutions around them.
A context appears to be a venue of participation from which information is pulled, say, like your FB wall. Note that FB prohibits API users from actually storing much of the data accessible while a user is logged in and operating with a website through the FB API, so your Location/Destination metaphor breaks down when the app has to deal with intermittent access or ephemeral information deriving from these "contexts."
Phones are pretty much in the "apps" part of the scheme, just an access device.
We are also struggling with the word Context. The thought was "a Connector is a dumb pipe and it needs a Context in which to run" (e.g. the auth credentials, etc.). Not perfect, and possibly something that will change in the not too distant future, but it works for now.
The whole project is still very young, but we are incredibly excited about all the cool apps that will be created on top of it.
It's not really a separate pipe, its's simply the bits of information that tell the dumb pipe where/how to run. For example, the Google Docs connector knows generically how to connect to a hypothetical person's Gdocs account, but the auth credentials provide the information that is required to connect to a real person's account.
A "smart pipe" is actually a lot more like the Collections. They bring data in from sets of similar Connectors (dump pipe) and collect, de-dupe, and normalize it.
This part doesn't feel appropriately named. The place a data is stored should be a 'Location' or a 'Destination'. A 'Context' might be a better name for where that data is used to express a bigger idea than just itself.
For example, I would look to my phone as a Destination for my contacts and these contacts showing up next to an event i'm going to with others as a Context. This feels more intuitive to me. I know I'm splitting hairs, but would love your opinions.
All that aside, really love this idea! Happy to see people becoming more aware of these issues and finding interesting solutions around them.