Technology

Before Snapchat made social media about just today, Facebook made it about forever. The 2011 &Timeline& redesign of the profile and keyword search unlocked your past, encouraging you to curate colorful posts about your lifetop moments. That was actually an inspiration for Snapchat, as its CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in its IPO announcement that &We learned that creativity can be suppressed by the fear of permanence.&

Now Facebook is finding a middle ground by optionally unlocking the history of your Stories that otherwise disappear after 24 hours. Facebook will soon begin testing Stories Highlights, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Similar to Instagram Stories Highlights, it will let you pick your favorite expired photos and videos, compile them into themed collections with titles and cover images and display them on your profile.

The change further differentiates Facebook Stories from the Snapchat Stories feature it copied. Itsmart for Facebook, because highly compelling content was disintegrating each day, dragging potential ad views to the grave with it. And for its 150 million daily users, it could make the time we spend obsessing over social media Stories a wiser investment. If you&re going to interrupt special moments to capture them with your phone, the best ones should still pay dividends of self-expression and community connection beyond a day later.

Facebook Stories Highlights was first spotted by frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong, who specializes in generating screenshots of unreleased features out of the APK files of Android apps. TechCrunch inquired about the feature, and a Facebook spokesperson provided this statement:&People have told us they want a waytohighlight and save the Stories that matter most to them. We&ll soon start testing highlights on Facebook & a way to choose Stories to stay on your profile,making it easier to express who you are through memories.&

These Highlights will appear on a horizontal scroll bar on your profile, and you&ll be able to see how many people viewed them just like with your Stories. They&ll default to being viewable by all your friends, but you can also restrict Highlights to certain people or make them public. The latter could be useful for public figures trying to build an audience, or anyone who thinks their identity is better revealed through their commentary on the world that Stories& creative tools offer, opposed to some canned selfies and profile pics.

Facebook paved the way for Highlights by launching the Stories Archive in May. This automatically backs up your Stories privately to your profile so you don&t have to keep the saved versions on your phone, wasting storage space. That Archive is the basis for being able to choose dead Stories to show off in your Highlights. Together, they&ll encourage users to shoot silly, off-the-cuff content without that &fear of permanence,& but instead with the opportunity. If you want to spend a half hour decorating a Facebook Story with stickers and drawing and captions and augmented reality, you know it won&t be in vain.

Facebook Stories constantly adds new features, like this Blur effect I spotted today

While many relentlessly criticize Facebook for stealing the Stories from Snapchat, its rapid iteration and innovation on the format means the two companies& versions are sharply diverging. Snapchat still lacks a Highlights-esque feature despite launching its Archive-style Memories back in July 2016. Instead of enhancing the core Stories product that made the app a teen phenomenon, itconcentrated on Maps, gaming, Search, professional Discover content, and a disastrously needless redesign.

Facebookfamily of apps seized on the stagnation of Snapchat Stories and its neglect of the international market. It copied whatever was working while developing new features like InstagramSuperzoom and Focus portrait mode, the ability to reshare public feed posts as quote tweet-style Stories and the addition of licensed music soundtracks. While writing this article, I even discovered a new Facebook Stories option called Blur that lets you shroud a moving subject with a dream-like haze, as demonstrated with my dumb face here.

The relentless drive to add new options and smooth out performance has paid off. Now Instagram has 400 million daily Stories users, WhatsApp has 450 million and Facebook has 150 million, while Snapchatwhole app has just 191 million. As Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom admitted about Snapchat, &They deserve all the credit.&Still, it hasn&t had a megahit since Stories and AR puppy masks. The companyzeal for inventing new ways to socialize is admirable, though not always a sound business strategy.

At first, the Stories war was a race, to copy functionality and invade new markets. Instagram and now Facebook making ephemerality optional for their Stories signals a second phase of the war. The core idea of broadcasting content that disappears after a day has become commoditized and institutionalized. Now the winner will be declared not as who invented Stories, but who perfected them.

If you visited a Bulletin store, or bought products off its website, COO Ali Kriegsman said you might &pigeonhole& the company as a &feminist apparel brand& — a place to buy T-shirts and accessories with fun, provocative political slogans.

And yes, that is part of what draws consumers. But Kriegsman and her co-founder Alana Branston have also laid out their broader vision for a more flexible, WeWork-style approach to brick-and-mortar retail, one where brands essentially rent out shelf space in Bulletin stores.

So brands that may have only sold online can experiment with physical sales, while shoppers can purchase from a curated, constantly refreshed selection of brands and products.

&We&re building this more feminine retail company, but we are also part real estate company, and now, we are also part technology company,& Kriegsman said.

The &now& that shereferring to is the launch of Bulletin Omni, a software platform that allows brands to apply to sell with Bulletin, manage their inventory and track their sales.

Bulletin has actually been working on something like this since I first talked to the team last year, but according to Maggie Braine, the companydirector of product and brand experience, Omni only just reached the point where the company is ready to roll it out to all of the 150 brands it works with. She said that without it, the company has mostly relied on &emails, phone calls, and a very, very large Google Doc& to manage the process.

Braine gave me a quick walk-through of Omni, showing me how a brand could, with just a few clicks, add a new product to its offerings in a given store, confirm once that product has actually arrived and then see how each product is selling in each store.

That&unheard of& in traditional retail, she said, where &therevery little transparency& once goods are purchased by retailers.With Omni, Braine said the goal is to give brands the same kinds of data around physical purchases that they have access to when they promote and sell their products through online channels.

She also said the team plans to introduce ways for in-store staff to offer feedback to the brands— like whether a product isn&t selling because ittoo expensive.

Kriegsman said that if the software does well enough, she could imagine Bulletin becoming &a retail software destination,& where other companies buy the software to manage non-Bulletin stores.

Either way, she predicted that Omni will allow Bulletin itself to expand more quickly. The company currently has three New York City stores — one in SoHo, one in Williamsburg and a recently opened location near Union Square — with plans to open in additional cities later this year.

Online sex market Backpage was seized in April following new regulation intended to stem human trafficking, but the results haven&t been entirely positive. This story of Indianapolis cops reverting to pre-web tactics for catching pimps and others in the sex trade shows how the closure has taken away a valuable tool for keeping tabs on the unsavory but ineradicable industry.

Backpage, where prostitutes would list themselves and attract customers, let the whole business take place rather in gig economy fashion rather than out on the street.

As controversial as the sex industry is, itnot going anywhere, and at the very least most of us can agree that it should at least be conducted as safely as possible. And Backpage did at least provide some level of safety and regularity to it, even if it also contributed to worse issues like sex trafficking.

&We used to look at Backpage as a trap for human traffickers and pimps,& explained undercover vice investigator John Daggy to RTV6. &We would subpoena the ads and it would tell a lot of the story. Now, since it has gone down, we&re getting late reports of them and we don&t have much to go by.&

As evidence, in 2017 Indianapolis cops charged four pimps using Backpage data, and dozens of prostitution cases used it as well. But this year only one pimp has been charged, caught via old-school undercover work: a cop posing as a prospective prostitute.

That may be what the movies present vice investigations as, but the truth is that kind of work is extremely dangerous, not to mention time-consuming and difficult. Having a nice digital trail to follow or cite in court was clearly a godsend.

As critics noted earlier this year, SESTA/FOSTA has good intentions but a seriously flawed execution resulting in numerous unforeseen consequences. This decline in police effectiveness in vice investigations is one of them.

&I get the reasoning behind it, and the ethics behind it,& Daggy said. &However, it has blinded us.&

You should read the rest of the story, as it has context from others and is part of a series on the sex trade in the city.