Google has launched their new platform ‘Keen’. Keen is an experimental product from Area 120 and Pair at Google. It’s been compared to Pinterest because of its social discovery aspect but Google will need to differentiate from this to succeed.
To use Keen you need to sign up, but this can be done with your Google Account. In the about section of their site they state: “Keen is a new way to curate, collaborate and expand your interests”. The site leverages the Google Search index and combines this with user feedback to provide users with personalised recommendations. Supposedly these will improve over time and they’ll help to expand your interests.
Once signed in you get a welcome pop-up to help you get started. The main features of Keen are to create, curate and share. To create a new Keen you click the plus, give your keen a title, select web searches to save, upload a cover image and a description, choose your settings and you’re done. This Keen will stay populated with pages related to your saved searches and then you can save pages to read later within that Keen.
This new tool is visually pleasing and great if you want to stay updated on specific searches and save interesting pages for later. Although it’s been compared to Pinterest I think that will come down to how you choose to use the platform. Unfortunately a lot of these side projects by Google end up shuttered because of lack of interest, so if it sounds interesting get signed up and give it a go.
