You’ve probably read online that Google launched something Pinterest-like last week, but did they really? Yes, and no, here’s why:
Pinterest-like
Yes because content discovery and curation-wise, Keen functions almost exactly like Pinterest. As a user, you either search and follow topics you’re interested in, or you create and curate content that other users can follow and enjoy. You can also do both.
If you prefer to set your content in private that’s an option too, but if you want to explore the social side of the site, you can invite other users to collaborate and build your keens with you.
Not Pinterest-like
Don’t get confused though.
In Keen, search results show keens (boards) of other users, not posts, so when you hit the follow button—know that what you’re following is a board of another user, and not a discovery feed for a certain topic.
And then when you click on a keen, you’ll see two sections: Gems and Explore. Gems are all the saved content of the user, and Explore is where Google does its magic of auto-generating content that are related to the keen you’re currently in. It is in that sense that it’s a bit different from Pinterest—not to mention navigation of the platform can be a bit confusing because images are in different sizes and there are text previews that appear quite tedious to read.
Valuable experiment
That said, Keen remains to be a valuable experiment for Google and its advertisers because, given it succeeds, it can become an effective medium for audience analysis, which could later result in ads optimization in the Google Ads platform.
If anything, the site is drawing a fair amount of interest from being compared to Pinterest alone, but as to whether it’s exciting enough to keep users actively keen-ing for long, we’ll see.
If you’d like to see and experience the much-talked about site, go to https://staykeen.com/ or you can get it on the Google Play Store.