With search engines, such as Google Chrome, people nowadays can explore ideas and their interests with just a few clicks. Couple that with social media, and you can connect with people who share your passion. Keen is a new social app from Google and the creators of Google Area 120. This app helps users retrieve resources—such as webpages and articles—from the web. More, it also allows them to collaborate with people who have the same interest as them. 

Create, curate, and collaborate

At a glance, Keen appears to be Google’s take on Pinterest. However, the app is more like Pinterest with Google’s smarts. Like Pinterest, the app takes your interest and provides you with resources gathered from the net. To start, users are encouraged to create their profile using their Google account. Then, they can start making their Keen—which are the topics you are interested in. Note that a keen requires a keyword or a phrase. 

After you have successfully created your keen, you can start saving web searches to get a feed related to it. You can also save links, text, and images. Aside from the ones you curated, you will also get automatically added content as selected by the app’s connection to Google. To help you expand your resources more, you can invite your friend and collaborate with them. The more resources you save to a keen, the better recommendations you get. 

Keen offers a good way to organize a large database of information scattered all over the internet. However, while it provides a convenient way to gather media in a social networking environment, using the app may prove to be difficult. For one, the app’s scroll capabilities are terrible. You will always go back from the beginning of the thread after clicking any keen or button. It doesn’t help that the search function does not work at all. On top of that, some articles provided are outdated.

Requires few improvements

Overall, Keen is an app with potential. It is a good app to use when you want to gather information and media on a topic you are interested in. It also offers a way to share ideas with other people. However, being a new app, it still has a few areas that need polishing. The biggest of which is its usability. Right now, its GUI is not as intuitive as many would want, and its design is hard to navigate.