I just wanted to write a quick note and let everyone know what we’ve been up to–because we’ve been busy. We’ve recently made a lot of progress on the site, especially considering that we can really only work on it during nights and weekends. So here are some of the highlights:

Improved Search
For those of you that used some of our earliest versions of the site, I’m sure you can tell the difference in performance.  We have increased many of our search times by at least an order of magnitude.  In addition we have really expanded the search syntax that you can use.  For example you can now include sport names, years, player names, brands, numbers and even some properties.  Keywords such as “relic”, “rookie” or “autograph” can be used.  So you can now look up “Kirby Puckett 1985 Topps #536″ or “Adrian Peterson rookie” or even “Hockey 1999 Gretzky autograph” and you’ll find what you’re looking for.  As we get more data we hope to expand even further potentially including teams and more.

Revamped Trading Lists
We now use smart lists to help you let people know what you want or are willing to give up.  By that I mean that you can say I want “Kirby Puckett” cards and your want list will show you all of the Kirby Puckket cards on Zistle that you don’t have.  Whats great about this is that as we get more and more cards your lists are automatically updated.  We have many, many more improvements in the pipeline with respect to trading, including trade reccomendations and the ability to embed these dynamic lists in your blog allowing you to manage your cards in on place and access it from many. Expect to hear much more from us about this soon.

Bugs galore!
We are really happy with the quality of the site right now, but we wouldn’t be here without the help of our users.  Thank You!  Please use the feedback tools or send us email, we love to hear from you.  In the end this site is about user participation, thats what will make it work.  So let us know what you want, we’ll be happy to talk with you about it and see if we can’t get it into Zistle.