Social Media

The first social media that I came across (nearly a decade ago now, in 2007) was Facebook. As with many things on the internet it was a case of "everyone else is doing it, so I should too". At first it was limited to people I'd know at school and family members; over the years my network expanded to include people I'd studied with, people I'd worked with and all sorts of other friends I'd gathered along the way. It is still my number one way to keep in touch with friends and (at time of writing) Facebook seem to have weathered the news feed algorithm storm to balance the posts I most want to see.

I think Twitter was my next foray into social media, it seems more recent but it was actually only a year after I started using Facebook. I think perhaps it is because it took me a few years to get the hang of Twitter. For a while it was my go to social network, but a lot of my Twitter friends have drifted away to other online hang-outs (Facebook mostly) and I don't find Twitter much fun without that personal touch. 

I was reading an article today on Twitter as a news app. This I found most amusing, whenever I find any news on Twitter I always go to check at least two other sources to authenticate it and check its veracity (!)

For me Instagram was never so much about social. I've never really manged to get into the whole community aspect and I use it mostly as a tool to easily share photos to Facebook and Twitter at the same time. Posts these days average around 50 likes (which pleases me). I absolutely refuse to measure the worth of anything I do on the internet by home many people 'like' it.

Instagram has recently followed Twitter and Facebook into the curse of the non-sequential timeline which uses complex algorithms to serve up posts instead of being ordered by time of posting.

Now it insists on serving me friends and family (whose handles I know and who I can go looking for their recent input) over other curated feeds I follow. The many London feeds I follow have dropped right off my timeline. This is odd, everything I've read about Instagram's algorithms mean the opposite should be true; heigh-ho it's given me about an hour of internet time back every day!

No thoughts on social media would be complete without LinkedIn. I'm not a fan. I use it because it is part of my job; that is it. It is quite useful to keep track of people that you once worked with. I find no purpose to it at all other than serving me a variety of stories without having to check through all my Feedly feeds.

I've not read anything about how LinkedIn serves up content with algorithms but it seems to defy all logic.

In a truly circular fashion, and despite repeated reports of its demise, Facebook is once again my venue of choice with social media.

What we've been watching (May & June)

We watch quite a lot of movies; at the moment LOVEFiLM send us two discs every week... although I'm always considering the best way to get our movies.

So this is what we watched in May and June (Eurovision and other reasons meant we didn't see many movies in May so I combined two months together) - come back to see what July has brought us.

Mission: Impossible - Rouge Nation

I'm a huge fan of the Mission Impossible films. I own them on DVD (that is the level of my enthusiasm). I was both excited and curious to see the latest instalment. This is the fifth movie in the series, more than four years since since number 4. 

The film is everything that it should be with all the regular cast back together and the appropriate amount of chasing around with the heroes escaping from unlikely situations in even more unlikely ways. I was particularly taken with the chase through London at the end of the movie. 

Minions

Didn't make it through to the end of this one (barely made it out of the starting blocks in fact). Turned out that we had over-estimated our enjoyment of 'Despicable Me'. I think that most of the positive reviews I saw of this came from friends with small children in tow.

Mrs Brown

Not by any means a new movie. Amazon's reluctance to have anything approaching a comprehensive catalogue for LOVEFiLM by post meant that our dwindling rental list needed a boost. In an unlikely turn of events neither Husband nor I had seen this.

I'm not an enormous fan of historical movies but this was well done, it was reasonably historically accurate and an excellent cast put it together well. The story of Queen Victoria and her servant who becomes an integral part of her life after the death of Prince Albert.

Extraction

I'm pretty sure that we chose this one because Bruce Willis's name was on the box. It wasn't an amazing offering as your standard sort of action movie - son attempts to rescue CIA agent father from a group of terrorists. Bruce Willis wasn't in the movie as much as you'd have hoped, and it was a pretty tame effort.

The Final Storm

Another film that didn't make it to the end. The mysterious stranger fleeing from the storm failed to capture my imagination.

Time Traveller (aka The Lovers)

Time travel is a complicated premise for any movie. This was badly realised and I was confused from the start. I got so fed up of Husband reminding what was going on across two time periods that I gave up.

Heist

A father goes in with some co-workers to rob a casino; when it all goes wrong they hijack a city bus. Jeffrey Dean Morgan gives an excellent performance, and whilst on the face of it a simple action movie it is worth watching to the end for the final denouement.

Hacked (aka The Den)

Watching the world of web chat users for a study the quiet online world is turned upside down when the central character witnesses an online murder which then becomes a bit close to home when her friends become targets.

Bridge of Spies

A cold war spy thriller set in the divided Berlin, a tale of espionage and exchange missions.