How Denver-based Handll is revamping social media curation

by Anthony Sodd
May 19, 2015

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Imagine you ran a website about professional football. How cool would it be if you could have every social media post relevant to the NFL streamed directly onto your website in real-time? Even better, what if you could do all that, but customize the stream to exclude anything that John Madden ever said? Visitors to your site would be treated to a show of everything that’s going on in the online-world of football without ever leaving your homepage or seeing anything about John Madden. A Denver-based startup called Handll is making exactly that possible.

“We believe that social content should be distributed broadly across the web in a way that benefits content publishers and adds to user experience,” Handll CEO Ethan Holien said. “Channels are a big part of how we get to that vision.”

Channels are what Handll calls the content it streams onto your website or app. Basically, the company does the heavy lifting to interface with various social networks, then uses an algorithm to make sure only quality and relevant content is chosen. The resulting media stream is called a channel, which is then embedded into an app or website.

“It’s not just a hashtag filter or something that serves up everything, it’s a channel of media that’s meant to drive engagement on a website or in an app, and be safe for brands,” Holien said.

While a hashtag filter will show you everything that's been marked with the chosen tag, you often miss a lot of relevant content that's not properly tagged. Worse, you’re also likely to end up with a ton of irrelevant content that is inappropriately tagged and not brand safe. Handll’s algorithm takes care of that, making sure a channel includes relevant content and excludes inappropriate content regardless of how it has been tagged.

So far the company has hundreds of premade channels to choose from, all of which are customizable. There are plans to expand the number and diversity of channels, and at some point they hope to have channels that can be customized from the ground up.

Handll is a young company — it was founded in September 2014 and has just over $1.4 million in funding, and six fulltime employees in an office in RiNo. The channel service is being used on over 30 sites, with more to come.

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