Early this year in February, Facebook launched an app Hobbi that helps you develop and maintain a hobby and was slated to be Pinterest rival. But after less than 10K downloads in the last 3 months on the AppStore, FB is pulling the plug on Hobbi. Meanwhile, Google has also entered into the competition with its new artificial intelligence powered app Google Keen to take on Pinterest.
Google Keen is an experimental webApp project, that allows app users to curate and collect data and information related to their personal or professional interests and hobbies.
Similar to the ‘pins’ that users pin to their virtual boards in Pinterest, Google Keen users can save “keens” to their board. The keens related to the topic of their choice or preference. The keens are saved as gems or links. Keen also allows users of all levels of expertise to save links, images, or gems of the topics they like or are interested in learning more about. What is different or unique is the background or under the hood ‘thing’ that makes Keen stand out? The real power behind this is the Google database and its Artificial intelligence-based Machine Learning algorithm.
Another important function is that the app will allow you to see all those keen moments add up to show your progress until that particular moment. If you are already impressed and are waiting to try this out, we can tell you that this gets better with time. As you save more keens, the machine learning algorithms understand your preferences, learns from them, and show you even more relevant and better. Save this, make your work more relevant and refined. What could be better than seeing even more relevant and focused content day after day?
Google, has a workshop in its incubator for doing all sorts of experiments on new apps and products. Keen is an outcome of the famous Google Area 120 workshop. Looks like the power of the artificial intelligence that is behind this product will take it to extreme popularity.
The co-founder of Keen, C.J. Adams has shared the moment when he had this as a brain wave. One night his wife and he were busy on their phones and were browsing trying to find relevant links, images and pages that were of interest. They spent hours every day without making much progress. That is when Adams thought of leveraging the power of machine learning and big data behind the artificial intelligence that would produce only the relevant and improved quality of content instead of mindless content shown. This would definitely reduce the users ‘wandering around’ looking for information about their favorite topics in the vast Internet space.
Google Keen
When we try it for the first time, Google Keen will ask us to choose a few topics of interest so that it can start looking for content on those. But if you would like the AI and ML to do the work for you right from start, you can let the app do the selection for you. Looks like Keen is keen to let you use the AI and ML that also powers the search engine algorithms.
We live in the social world, so it will not at all be a surprise if we said that you can share your saved keens with your friends. As expected, the reverse is also true and you can ask for recommendations of topics from your friends or known experts in their respective areas.
Another great idea would be to use this as a collaborative tool for creative projects, school assignments, or art and other recreational activities.
We are keen to try it out. Are you game for it? Google Keen is available for download now for Android systems alongside its competitor, of course, Pinterest.
