Keen: a new AI-based social network

Whether its baking cakes, finding a new career or setting up your own studio at home, ‘Keen’ lets you curate the content you love, share your collection with others and find new content based on what you have saved according to a blog post published by the platform founder CJ Adams on June 19, 2020.

Founder CJ Adams and his wife both have common interests in birding and flower farming and have shared many pictures and links together about these topics. To explore the idea further, Adams and four of his colleagues created an experiment called Keen as part of Area 120- a workshop for Google’s experimental products- and PAIR- People + AI Research. Keen has Google’s expertise in machine learning which makes it different from Pinterest. The more you collect information and pictures in an organized way, the more get recommendations.

Whether you are an expert in a topic or an amateur, you can create a ‘Keen’ for every interest save related images, text, links, and web pages. Based on that, the platform generates a feed with new things to explore. Keen users can invite their friends to collaborate and build a community. They can choose whether they want to go public or keep their Keen private.

On June 28, 2011, Google +, a social network owned and operated by Google was launched. This network was closed on April 2 last year. However, in 2020, Keen will become Google’s new social network.

Keen is a modern rethinking of Google Alerts, which allows users to receive content related to a specific topic in a specific time via email. It is available on the Web or on Android App.

The Pinterest-style platform will allow Google to know user’s interests and collect these data. Which may open up debate on user’s privacy in the near future.