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Keen — Curate, collaborate and expand your interests
Technology struggles to understand what we want to spend our time on. Keen is an experimental app that lets you control your recommendations by helping you curate the content you love, share collections with others and find new content based on what you save
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Replies
Robin Good
Very interesting new curation tool from Google. Nothing really to do with Pinterest and much more similar to a cross-breed between Flipboard and Wakelet.
Strong points:
- Easy-to-use
- Suggests on-topic content from which to extract valuable collectable items
- Performs persistent-searches on the topics you specify (from a pre-determined set)
- Auto-grabs image and intro text from any link you submit
- Can organize collection into sections
- Can invite collaborators
- Private / Public option for any collection
Weak points:
- Cannot add commentary, opinion, introduction (can only comment and the content of comments is not immediately visible to who browses the collection)
- Cannot easily organize / arrange content items on the collection (you can only make any one resource in the collection become the first one)
- Public URL sucks - non intelligible - it doesn't carry author's name nor topic
- Collection image difficult to set - it doesn't like Dropbox, Google Photos or GDrive shared images so it isn't clear where does it want the user to pick images from. It often gives back an error for proper image URLs (
)
Overall:
A curation tool which does not allow the curator to add his own commentary / viewpoint / context to the elements of the collection is useless. Interpretation by a subject-matter expert is what gives value to it. The rest any machine can do.
Still, for those looking to bring together different content resources into shareable collections this is a viable tool, like Wakelet, Elink and many others.
)
Overall:
A curation tool which does not allow the curator to add his own commentary / viewpoint / context to the elements of the collection is useless. Interpretation by a subject-matter expert is what gives value to it. The rest any machine can do.
Still, for those looking to bring together different content resources into shareable collections this is a viable tool, like Wakelet, Elink and many others.Share
Hi @robingood thanks for having a look at Keen and sharing your thoughts!
I'm one of the small team people working on Keen, and wanted to followup to make sure I understand and see if we can improve keen.
- Commentary:
I wanted to check to understand a bit more what you mean by "Cannot add commentary, opinion, introduction"; perhaps we need to make it clearer how to, but after you gem something from explore feed, you can edit it to add commentary (edit option is in the menu after you gem, or in the menu of a gem of your gems view). For example, if you have a look at this keen, you'll see lots of commentary: https://staykeen.com/keen/OWwkHP...
Keen's themselves can also have some additional description, which you can add from the edit button on the keen page too.
Are either of these ideas what mean by commentary?
- Attribution
At the bottom of every gem, we also include the name of the person who contributed it. Is that what you meant by carrying the authors name?
- Organisation with a section:
We're working on supporting custom sort order for items in a section; right now you can hack it by editing a tip and it comes to the front of the list. Not a good hack, but we'll improve this soonish.
- Custom images:
We also plan to have an update that lets you upload custom images for tips soon. :)
cheers and best wishes,
lucas
@iislucas Hey Lucas, thank you so much for getting back to me on these individual items. I am more than happy to be able to analyze them with you.
1) Commentary - when I edit a Gem I have selected I do not have any option to add a commentary. Here is the dialog box I see: 
I can only set the section in which this gem goes into.
I can see that I can add comments below a gem, but these are not visible to the reader unless you click them.
I have no idea of how you have been able to add your intros to that sample page.
2) Attribution - I didn't mention this. Did I?
3) Organization - great, loom forward to it
4) Custom images - here the problem is another one. I have not been able to set a custom image for a collection. Many correct URLs are not accepted and I just don't know anymore what to feed Keen to show an opening image.
I am happy to read that you will be able to do so also for individual posts.
I can only set the section in which this gem goes into.
I can see that I can add comments below a gem, but these are not visible to the reader unless you click them.
I have no idea of how you have been able to add your intros to that sample page.
2) Attribution - I didn't mention this. Did I?
3) Organization - great, loom forward to it
4) Custom images - here the problem is another one. I have not been able to set a custom image for a collection. Many correct URLs are not accepted and I just don't know anymore what to feed Keen to show an opening image.
I am happy to read that you will be able to do so also for individual posts.@robingood Thanks for following up!
1) Ah, I see the confusion. Where you have entered a link, you can actually add text and commentary also. Just type more stuff above or below of the link. You can also add #tags, and @mentions. We've been talking about separating the link from the commentary, I think your experience suggests that would make it easier to understand you can add commentary also. Very helpful feedback!
2) Attribution; sorry I guess I misunderstood this: "Public URL sucks - non intelligible - it doesn't carry author's name nor topic", could you say a little more?
4) Thanks we are fixing that too, so you can upload not just tip images, but also Keens also (the collections).
cheers,
lucas
@mentions @iislucas
1) Oh! OK. But, that's not very intuitive - Look forward to see this improved
2) Public URL - the URL at present is a mess of characters - an intelligible URL would be one that contains both the collection author's name as well as the name of the collection, like: StayKeen.com/RobinGood/content-curation
3) Good. Look forward to it.
@robingood
1) agree! we'll try and make that clearer.
2) Ah, thanks. I see what you mean. We've been planning to add support for custom user names, which could give that kind of vanity URL. I'll discuss it with the team.
We've also just added support for custom-images to be added to gems (that I mention in my first post). We've got a little more to do for custom keen collection cover images.
If you want to stay up to date on the latest features landed to keen, we now have a meta-keen, where we write about and post updates to keen https://staykeen.com/keen/pdG0Vs...
I've been using it in alpha for a few weeks now and I love the minimalist design and how it allows me to focus on the content rather than ads or friends posts. Keen provides some great suggestions. A great place to keep all my interests organized!
@david_arnedo2 I'm sure ads will come later or the service will shut by next few Google Spring cleanings.