In mid-2020, Google introduced an Area 120 project called Keen that was a take on Pinterest but with ML recommendations. It’s now shutting down this month.
A board/collection of something you’re interested in, like gardening or baking, was referred to as a “keen.” Besides manually adding content, Google used machine learning and Search to find related content.
The more you save to a keen and organize it, the better the recommendations become. 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.
You could follow other keens/boards, and would get updates as things were added. Google offered a bookmarklet for streamlined saving, with the last major update to the service being in December of 2021.
StayKeen.com — pretty good URL — is now shutting down and users were emailed today to export their Keen data as a ZIP file. It includes “links you curated, images you uploaded, and text posts you own”:
- Go to staykeen.com/download
- Select Keens to download
- Select “Next” to preview keens to download
- Select “Download data”
On March 24, the website “will no longer be accessible and all your Keens will be deleted (including all posts, uploads, likes, follows, and comments).”
Google credits Keen as helping “guide new thinking about how recommendation systems can better serve people’s real life interests.”
In January of 2023, Google shut down the majority of Area 120 initiatives as part of broader layoffs.
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