Sneak Peek — The Forno Bravo Pizza Map

We’ve been working hard on a new feature for Fornobravo.com that I want to share with FB Blog readers — the Forno Bravo Pizza Map. We will be launching the map soon, but I wanted to give you the inside scoop. Think of this sneak-peak as a pre-Beta; this is fun stuff!

The FB Pizza Map is a service that will allow you to easily find the best pizzerias when you are home and traveling, and to share your thoughts, reviews, and photos with other members of the wood-fired oven community. There are a couple of important differences between the FB Pizza Map and those big restaurants and travel review sites.

First, the database for the FB Pizza Map is curated. We are building the world’s best database of the world’s best pizzas. We decide which pizzerias are allowed in, and only the best qualify. Which means no chains, no Pizza Hut and no Domino’s. California Pizza Kitchen makes an edible, food-like substance, but it isn’t pizza, and they aren’t in the FB Pizza Map. We want ensure that every pizzeria and restaurant in the FB Pizza Map database offers something special, including care, dedication and a great pizza. Still, even with these limitations, the FB Pizza Map is large and includes thousands of great pizza places and a very large number of wood-fired restaurants.

Second, our application allows you to search not only by location and “pizza” but also by the good stuff, including wood-fired, VPN Certified, Caputo flour and mobile. And we are going to be adding more search options soon, including coal-fired and Chicago deep dish. We want to help you find what you are looking for.

And finally, there is you. The FB Pizza Map is not a mass market service. We want the comments and restaurant ratings to reflect the taste and judgement of you — the pizza intelligentsia. That means that the ratings and comments in the FB Pizza Map will be useful, and trustworthy because they are from other people like you. If the community concludes that a restaurant or pizzeria does not deserve to be listed in the FB Pizza Map, we will remove them. We will vote them off the island.

We hope that today is the start of something big.

I think there is a genuine opening in the market for this type of service. There a number of somewhat similar services — the big review sites, pizza enthusiast sites and top pizzeria lists — but I don’t think there is a single site that provides the data, the search features and the community that the FB Pizza Map will provide. On a personal level, I’ve been hoping to find something like this for years and never did. So we decided to build it for ourselves.

There is a lot of work to be done — we are still improving the database and tuning the application (and, of course, we need to start working in the iPhone app), but I think it is time to share the fun. Let me know what you think; recommend features and report bugs.

One last thing. The FB Pizza Map is (and will always be) a free service. We will never accept advertising and we will always keep private information on our members and website traffic, and we will never share or sell that information to another company.

That’s it. Let’s have fun and eat some great pizza.