‘Keen’ – A New Home to Share your Passion

Google has unveiled a new Pinterest-like app — Keen — which will allow people to collect and share ideas, links and resources. Keen, a web and Android app, allows users to create a Keen – a board on whatever subject they want.

On Keen, you can define your preferred topics and then curate content from the web. You can make a “keen” about any subject, from baking delicious home-made bread, getting into birding or typography research.

When Pinterest was launched, it was simply a pin-board style platform where people could share their interests. But over the years, as Pinterest has evolved into a visual exploration tool and increasingly focused on eCommerce, which probably interests Google.

That’s why Google has been seeking to repeatedly add Pinterest-like features and tools. The latest attempt by Google on this front is a new app called Keen, “a place to grow and share interests with your loved ones, and find things that will help make this precious life count.”

Curate and Share

Keen helps you to curate your content, share your collection with others, and discover new content based on what you saved.

Users can add images and other tools, invite friends to interact and follow “Keens” that they find fascinating.

The keens can be private or public, so you can control what’s shared. Once you’ve set up a Keen for a particular topic or interest, Google will use its advanced search algorithms to find content similar to what you’ve added, highlighting other things you may want to include in your Keen.

Sounds a lot like Pinterest, right?

Yes, Keen looks like a Pinterest clone. It adds to the growing list of tools Google has released as a means of keeping Pinterest in check from becoming a real search problem.

Discover New Content

You can curate ‘Keen’ on your own, or for others. At Google, the Keen team worked closely with another team called People and AI Research (PAIR), committed to human-centered machine learning systems.

Even if you’re not an expert on a subject, you can start curating a keen and save some interesting links that are helpful to you.

People can also follow the keens created by others, finding thousands of community-based hand-curated lists and having updates when new items are being added.

Devote Time for What you Love

The objective of keen is to offer you a home for your interests, a place to grow them, and to share them with your loved one. It isn’t a platform to spend endless hours browsing.

However it appears that Google is merely testing the waters and seeing whether users are interested in trying out the app. That seems almost like the aim of these tools – helpful in itself, worth checking out.

It seems that Google is simply trying to integrate the same phenomenon as Pinterest. With the benefit of its search algorithms to find similar content, it may be better positioned to build an app that addresses its needs. Download the app to see more Keens here.