Google is the tech giant of the web and beyond. And with its massive resources, it has what it takes to compete with others.
Through its incubator Area 120. which is simply a workshop for Google's experimental products, the team has introduced 'Keen', a web and Android app that allows users to curate content from the web and share their collection with others.
The idea came when CJ Adams was with his wife at home in the evening, mindlessly filling the gaps between work and sleep by browsing their feeds of post, images and news.
At that time, they started collecting some of the things that brought them joy, and started sharing them with each other.
"She grew up birding and knew I was interested, so she sent me links to resources on bird identification, migration patterns and good binoculars. Since we met, we had also dreamed about someday starting a flower farm, so we began collecting notes on farming plans, seed catalogs and other ideas to chase that dream together," Adams said.
"It was powerful to tell each other what we wanted to spend more time on. And once we did, we found that collecting related ideas, links and resources together gave us a way to spend more time on our shared passions in real life."
In a blog post, Adams that wanted to explore this idea further. teamed up with four of his colleagues and co-founded Keen.
Adams said that Keen is not intended to "be a place to spend endless hours browsing," but rather a place where people can share and grow their interests.
In the blog post, Adams explained that on Keen, users can say what they want to spend more time on, and then curate content from the web and people they trust to help make that happen.
From baking to bird watching, or research typography, Keen allows users to curate the content they love, share their collection with others and find new content based on what they have saved.
In other words, Keen is more or less, like Pinterest.
And also like Pinterest, Keen also leverages machine-learning technology to suggest users with related content.
"We worked in close collaboration with a team at Google called People and AI Research (PAIR), dedicated to human-centered machine learning systems, to develop this experiment," said Adams
With Google's machine-learning technology, Keen will use Google Search and AI to "remain on the lookout for helpful content related to your interests."
By learning from users' interest, the more often users browse and being active in Keen, the better the AI will become in showing recommendations.
"The more you save to a keen and organize it, the better the recommendations become," he explained.
"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."
And just like social media in general, users can follow others' keen, and receive updates when new items are added.
For Google, Keen can be just another source for the company to gain insight on users.
By requiring users to link their Google accounts, Google can use Keen to further collect more user data and add them to the existing mountainous of data it already collected from users.
While users cannot do anything about that, Keen does offer some privacy options. For example, users can make their keens public or private. What this means, users are in control of what it is shared, and who can contribute to it.