Ms. Nguyen (Photo: We Are NY Tech)

New York-based street style social network Thre.ad announced in an email sent out to users today that it will be shutting down. The company's owners would probably rather you think of it as a pivot, however: According to the announcement, they're folding Thre.ad into a new ecommerce site called That's Foxy, which will deliver "shop-able products that are inspired by what’s trending in the community."

The email announcement explains that the transition from Thre.ad to That's Foxy is due to the fact that many of Thre.ad's users browsing street style looks wanted the option to be able to easily shop for the items showcased in the photos. A quick perusal of That's Foxy shows street style-like photos with a specific accessory or article of clothing highlighted, which users can click to purchase.

Thre.ad launched in private beta in November 2011 and was in the process of raising a $760,000 round back in February; according to its Form D, the company had raised $560,000 of that round. No updated Form Ds have since been filed.

The company's CEO, Mimi Nguyen, is a fixture on the New York tech social scene. Last year, she helped organize the Raise Cache fashion show to help benefit Hack NY. Justin Bieber, who knows Ms. Nguyen through a nonprofit she cofounded called Pencils of Promise, was rumored to have agreed to invest in Thre.ad, though that was never confirmed. "If he ever wants to [invest], I wouldn’t be against that,” Ms. Nguyen told Mashable at the time.

Wonder if the Biebs will be willing to toss some cash at That's Foxy?

(Photo: Styleblaster)

Styleblaster, a project installed by a handful of Brooklyn-based technologists that uses a camera to chronicle the sartorial choices of Williamsburg residents and upload the photos in real-time to the web, has quickly devolved into trolling.

When a Daily Dot commenter used Google Maps to sleuth out the address, it spread across the internet lightning-fast. The camera is situated in a window at 234 Driggs Ave., a block from the Bedford Avenue stop.

Now, Styleblaster has become the target of orchestrated trolling attacks from sites like Remezcla, which dispatched a blogger to strut in weird masks and costumes in front of the camera. Donning colorful masks, sombreros and big thick mustaches, they quickly racked up a fair amount of "tophats," which is the style blog's equivalent of an upvote.

The Remezcla team aren't the only ones who have taken to mugging for the camera. Otherwise oblivious passersby quickly caught on once word of Styleblaster hit the web--one even gave the finger to the camera. Here's a picture of a girl slurping a soda and making a "what up" gesture.

A "destination for New York City peacocks," indeed.

(Photo: Styleblaster)

In an effort to catalog the underappreciated diversity of style in gentrified Williamsburg, a team of Brooklyn technologists has set up a camera outside their apartment that records the street stylings of passersby and posts the images online. But if passersbys don’t want to be recorded, they’re kind of out of luck.

The site, called Styleblaster, aims to “become a destination for New York City peacocks to traipse by and show off what makes the neighborhood hop.” Using a camera perched a block from the Bedford Ave. L train, the site captures and immediately uploads images of Brooklynites walking by in real time. Users can then click a tophat to signal whether or not the subject is “stylin’."

Click once through Styleblaster and you land on a picture of a moody girl with dark, blunt bangs trudging down the block in heavy black boots; click again and it's a mom pushing a baby stroller; again, and it's a dude with his hand down his pants.

Styleblaster is a personal project of Jules Laplace, the technology director for OkFocus, the creative agency behind the Kanye West/Donda Media PR stunt. The team created WhoDat.biz, a domain lookup site that purported to be the first startup of rapper Kanye West but was eventually revealed to be a big hoax.

Mr. Laplace has created a host of other online projects and games, like Where's the Pixel? and video-sharing chat site Scanner Jammer. Mr. Laplace's business partner, Ryder Ripps, told Betabeat via email that the project is not affiliated with OkFocus.

The idea for the site came from Mr. Laplace and his roommates, who are all "fairly technically minded." His roommate, new media artist and recent NYU ITP grad Jack Kalish, designed the software that takes the photos. "The camera sits in our apartment and takes a photo whenever someone passes by our window," Mr. Laplace said over email. "We have a webcam hooked up to a Processing sketch, which sends pictures up into the cloud.  To get people walking from right to left--so they'd be seen front on--we do motion detection using an optical flow field.  It's pretty cool, seeing it at work: it looks like the person is pulling a bunch of rubber bands across the frame, which tell it to snap the picture."

Mr. Laplace said the goal is to capture a portrait of Williamsburg fashion live and as it happens. "It's an egalitarian take on streetstyle," he said. "There's more to Williamsburg than hipsters and rich ex-Manhattanites. Everybody has their own style, and our site celebrates that."

But the project resurfaces privacy issues that were thrust into the mainstream by the scandal surrounding Reddit's creepshots forum, where users posted sexualized photos of women without their consent before Reddit administrators shut it down. Still, Mr. Laplace insists that unlike WhoDat.biz, this isn’t one of OkFocus’ attempts at subversiveness. He dismissed privacy concerns by noting that with the amount of foot traffic the block sees, the images are quite ephemeral.

"As far as privacy goes, we count on people to be dressed well when they go out in public--especially on a brisk fall day," he said. "Don't expect the pictures to hang around, though. Fashion gets stale after a couple of days, so we don't see a point in constructing an endless archive. This is really about the moment."

There are surveillance cameras installed all over New York City, inside ATMs and subway stations and convenience stores. The laws in New York regarding video surveillance are very specific. To summarize, video surveillance is only illegal if the subject has a reasonable expectation of privacy, meaning "a place and time when a reasonable person would believe that he or she could fully disrobe in privacy." You're probably not going to begin undressing on Bedford Avenue--unless you're the dude with his hand in his pants.

"I'd like to think that sort of behavior [related to Creepshots] is a relic of a time when people really were awful to each other online," Mr. Laplace added. "The internet's junior high phase, if you will. Our site isn't here to judge people or make fun of them. We're really just in it for the fashion, to be inspired by normal people and our great neighborhood."

(h/t Adrian Chen)