Google has announced its latest experiment, an app called Keen . Keen is being developed by Area 120 (Google ’s “laboratory” that works on the company’s experimental products ) and the People and AI Research (PAIR) group , which researches and designs human-centric AI systems.
Keen is a web and Android application (like Pinterest) that will allow users to collect content from the internet, organize it into collections, and share it with other users.
Keen’s co-founder explained how users can create a “keen” about any topic they want, from baking a cake and bird watching to researching typography. All a user is create a title and add and save related web searches, text, and images.
According to its creators, Keen is not intended to be “a place for users to spend endless hours browsing” but a place where people can share and develop their interests.
For each keen that is created, Google will use the Google Search index and machine learning functions to suggest relevant content.
The more organized a keen is (which means having a lot of content stored), the better the suggestions Google makes for related content.
“Even if you’re not an expert on a topic, you can start collecting and saving some interesting data or links that you find useful. These pieces of content act as seeds and help you discover more and more relevant content over time.”
According to Google, keens can be private or public, so users can control what they share with others. At the same time, users will be able to follow keens created by others.
