It is 3am and Josh and I have been working all night adding more collection functionality and started to build our trading platform. Somewhere during that time we realized that Zistle passed the 250,000 mark! We have over 250,000 cards in our library now and we are growing faster than ever thanks to some of our rock-star users. We have to give a special shout-out to Shane at Shoebox Legends who has added over 1,000 cards since becoming a member. Wow! Shane has added a ton of hockey cards which is a huge help since we need those cards the most. A big thanks to Shane and all our members who added cards to our library and have been building their collection on Zistle. It is amazing to watch this great community grow. Keep up the great work Zistlers!

Building a library of sports cards that our members can search and use to organize their sports collections is really the key to the Zistle experience. Without a comprehensive library Zistle cannot offer much value to its members. This is why the central mission of Zistle is to build the largest online database of baseball, football, hockey and basketball cards in existence. It didn’t take us long to realize that with millions and millions of cards, the only way to succeed in this mission is to leverage the information that each member has in their own collection and provide an easy way they can share it with the community. This is why we have built a platform which enables members to add and edit to the Zistle library while they are building and organizing their own collections. While we have used a variety of tactics to create as much content as possible to seed the library, we have developed several tools that allow users to add and edit our library if any cards are missing or incorrect.

If this doesn’t make sense, just think of Zistle as the Wikipedia of baseball, football, hockey, and basketball cards. The possibility is really amazing. How cool would it be if Zistle users could collaboratively create the most authoritative source of information on card collecting? We think that is pretty freakin’ awesome and we are betting that other collectors will agree with us and join our cause.

Of course we realize that we need to do our part which means creating the tools to make this sharing painless and perhaps even fun. For Zistle, this means integrating this process seamlessly into the normal interface of the site as well as making the process easy and not disruptive to the main experience. We have spent a lot of our time thinking about these features and how we can optimize our members’ experiences with our site. Initially to maintain the quality of our library, we plan to review all entries to the library but eventually we want to turn this function over to the community. For now, we have created a flagging system so that members can easily flag cards that are duplicates, inaccurate or missing information. We can see that this system could potentially become more robust and collaborative. What we are really excited about is to watch how our users will utilize these tools and to hear feedback as well as new ideas for creating and moderating the library. That is where the fun really begins.

If you have any feedback or ideas about the library idea even at this stage, we would love to hear it. You will find us very humble about the fact that we may not have the right solution but we sure will try. Just leave a comment or email me at ashley@zistle.com.