Community Update

Hello everyone!

It's been a busy ~6 or so weeks for the team. We started our first enterprise sales campaign while trying to collect votes for Twin Cities Startup Week in October. We performed FAR beyond what I expected and it's looking like we'll be given the opportunity to speak.* Now that the sales setup and long PR march are winding down we'll return to our regularly scheduled cadence of weekly longer form posts.

One thing I want to mention to the new blog subscribers we picked up during our PR campaign on X - if you're interested in becoming an "ambassador" (doing affiliate marketing) for Pulse feel free to reach out or schedule a call with us. We'd like to try and start off-boarding people from other less functional entertainment/news apps. I know a lot of X creators are struggling with a gameplan now that spaces are being removed in September.

Last thing - before I get in to tech updates I want to thank every single person who voted for us at Twin Cities Startup Week from the bottom of my heart. It's been a struggle to get even a few eyes looking at Pulse and this helped us establish a stronger foothold as a community locally and on X.

Major Updates

  • Last week we axed the purple UI
    • The purple struck many users as "goofy" or "unprofessional" in Kash and Overmind and the result is something a lot more enterprise-friendly and bespoke
New overmind profile area - all photos in linked post/experience is live on demo
  • Support for Grok 4 and Claude 4 Sonnet in Explore/Analyze has been shipped as of last night
    • Both models are great at different things - as usual Grok 4 is a high performer in research tasks and Sonnet is quite strong in problem solving
  • Better social media experience in Kash threads complete with profile pictures for registered nodes with bios on long press or mouseover were shipped along with the bespoke UI
    • This takes Pulse from something that can emulate social media to something that really feels like a new product in that space
  • Easy select all/select search results functionality in Kash tags for running workflows and cleaning up digests
    • Mini models continue to shine in this experience because of how quickly they can one-shot simple tasks like changing tags or creating followups

Tech Notes

(No worries if your eyes begin to glaze over - these are mostly backend tech updates for the hacker audience, feel free to skip this part.)

  • Finished implementing our final tag filtering schema, tags serve as prefixes so advertising the tag "fish" to a pod will also advertise the tags "fish-ocean" and "fish-lake" and "fish-weird"
    • ILIKE wildcards were too broad and specific single tags were too narrow, this seems to be a working medium for usability and not accidentally exposing data to pods
  • Improved awareness of both the current date and previously browsed links in Explore and Quantum search backend services
  • Fixed a bug that's been haunting me for a few months that would (rarely) cause spam and memory leaks when syncing large nodes to the vector search MS

(Explanation of asterisk from the intro paragraph)

*The organizers haven't officially closed voting yet despite it being 2 days later and another talk received a very large dump of votes very late in the day on the 20th so we'll see what's going on there when and if they ever reach back out to us. I'm hoping this is just me having a negative bias RE: popularity contests and not gamesmanship on the part of that team or the organizers but I want to document my concerns here - we plan on maintaining a professional tone and are monitoring the situation closely.