The new experiment ‘Keen’ has been developed as part of Area 120, Google`s workshop for experimental projects, in close collaboration with a team at Google called People and AI Research (PAIR), which is dedicated to human-centered machine learning systems. Keen, which is a web and Android app, lets the users create their own version of Pinterest’s board. “On Keen, you say what you want to spend more time on, and then curate content from the web and people you trust to help make that happen,” wrote CJ Adams, Co-founder of Keen in a blog post. “You make a “keen,” which can be about any topic, whether it’s baking delicious bread at home, getting into birding or researching typography. Keen lets you curate the content you love, share your collection with others and find new content based on what you have saved.”
Users can add links, photos and other resources, invite friends to collaborate and follow “Keens” they find interesting. You can curate for yourself or for other people. You can use Keen to build a collection of your best resources on a topic you know well and share it with people who would enjoy your curation. The keens can be private or public, so you control what is shared and who can contribute. “For every keen you create, we use Google Search and the latest in machine learning to remain on the lookout for helpful content related to your interests. The more you save to a keen and organize it, the better the recommendations become. Even if you’re not an expert on a topic, you can start curating a keen and save a few interesting “gems” or links that you find helpful. These bits of content act like seeds and help keen discover more and more related content over time. You can also follow keens that others have created, discovering thousands of hand-curated lists from the community and getting alerts when new things are added,” Adams added. “Keen isn’t intended to be a place to spend endless hours browsing. Instead, it’s a home for your interests: a place to grow them, share them with loved ones and find things that will help in making this precious life count,” he concluded. Keen is now available on the Google Play Store and the web, which you can access using an existing Google account.
