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If you’re idea of great pizza starts with a “D” or has the word “Hut” in it, then you probably don’t need to read any further.  On the other hand, if your pizza requires a stone oven, charcoal grill, or something other than a conveyor belt with a heat source, then you’ll be interested in this.

Whether you own the restaurant or you frequent pizza joints, you probably have things you think could improve or are wondering how great your favorite pie really is.  Enter thePizzaExperts.com.

Building on the unexpected huge popularity of his blog, WorstPizza.com, Lapp (our editor) decided to move things to the next level.  He and his crew got so many questions from restaurants they’d visited and reviewed that he decided there must be a need for real, independent, critique and review of pizza.

The group offers consulting on website development and design for pizza restaurants, as well as marketing setups through their affiliated sites PizzaTweetup.com and WorstPizza.com.  They also offer, of course, fair and unbiased critique of the pizza offered by the restaurant, including what can improve as well as what’s being done right.

This is a very unique idea and is niche-marketing at its finest, I think.  The combination of IT development, social marketing, and expertise in pizza is unusual, so this idea would be hard to copy and beat.  Definitely a good one.

File this under “that’s nutty awesome.”  It’s an extremely simple idea and is probably as old as ASCII itself, but turning plain text upside down has been the stuff of cyber-trickery for all of our modern age.  Now, with the latest communication tool being Twitter, comes Tweact.com.

This is one of those things that despite being as old as the byte it’s based on, it never seems to lose its novelty.  No matter what, it’s always going to make people look twice at what you’ve sent, even if it’s just to say “haha, how do I do that?”  It’s akin to those endless forwarded emails that everyone knows is b.s., but everyone forwards anyway.  Why?  Because it’s still entertaining.

I could analyze why upside-down text always grabs our attention, which may explain why some ideas like this one are just endlessly entertaining to us.  The look of upside down text immediately makes our brains engage.  I think it’s because we’re psychologically trained to see specific shapes and sequences.  That is, after all, how we read.  When we’re presented with the same shapes, but in a generally unfamiliar way, we pause.  Therein lies the entertainment.

I liken it to comedy.  Most people listen to “brainy” comedians like Dennis Miller and feel compelled to laugh at his jokes–no matter how esoteric and almost meaningless they might be.  Why?  Because not laughing would make us “stupid.”  That’s what I call “forced” comedy.

Then there’s slapstick, “low-brow” comedy ala Larry the Cable Guy.  Many people think it’s “beneath them,” but everyone laughs at it.  Even if they’re pretending not to.  It’s just funny.  Why?  Because he’s taking something normal and twisting it into abnormality in such a way that it attacks our sensibilities.  He makes racial slurs, fart noises, says stuff that’s totally obvious, but sounds goofy just because he’s saying it.  That sort of thing.  Nobody classifies that stuff as “genius” in any way, but it’s still funny.  Every time.

Tweact is like that.  It’s not new, original, or even really all that funny.  But it’s still engaging and entertaining.  Every time.  Totally.  That means it’s worth checking out and playing with.

The way it works is simple.  The page loads with a Google-like plain title and box.  Put in your line of text in the box and, as you type, another box with the output (upside down text) appears.  Click “Tweet This” or “Facebook It” and it’s presented to your twitter.com or facebook.com page.  You don’t have to give Tweact any information about you at all, it sends the data directly to the Twitter or Facebook API without your login required.  You then authenticate it through the normal channels for those sites and it’s posted.

Now, of course, since what its’ sending is pure ASCII and not regular text characters, some screens won’t show it as anything more than random Chinese.  Seesmic and TweetDeck, for instance, present it in blocks and dashes rather than words.  On the Web, though, it looks like upside-down text.

I confess that I had fun this with one.  I think you will too.

Freelance nation piggybacks profiles with leading social networking platform

There comes a point in life when you own one too many keys, and may get mistaken for a weighed-down, off-duty custodian minus the mop. The same is growing true of virtual online keys – the dozens of account handles, logins and passwords we repeat, recycle, tweak, and ultimately confuse and forget.

Thankfully, Vois and Facebook have linked together to sync up and streamline their accounts. Facebook members can now use the Facebook Connect utility to hook up with Vois.com (Virtual Outsourcing is Social), the world’s freshest freelance professional marketplace, without cycling through yet another registration process.

What this means is that Facebook members don’t have to create a separate account for Vois, a publicly-traded, social commerce Web company that combines the power of social networking with an online marketplace for on-demand services.

Instead, Web-savvy professionals can connect using existing Facebook profile information, friends and privacy preferences, and log into Vois.com without wasting extra keystrokes. To make this happen, Facebook members simply click the “Facebook Connect” prompt displayed on the Vois website. Whammy, it’s that easy.

Once connected, Facebook members can then share information and actions on Vois with their friends on Facebook via Facebook-fed stories and status updates.

“Facebook Connect integration was a natural fit for Vois, as Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities, which is ideally the cornerstone of Vois.com’s social commerce network,” said Gary J. Schultheis, Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer of Vois. “With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real information with them to Vois, including the basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups and more.”

The convergence of Vois and Facebook is about more than convenience and a few saved keystrokes; it’s about leveraging the well-built content and connections from one popular networking platform and using it to get a step ahead in another.

The following piece was written by Dean Moses, Co-Founder and CTO of Widgetbox, as part of our “Drinking the Kool-Aid” series. The series gives startup founders and executives a platform to talk about their startup, experiences so far, what the future holds for them, and offer general insights in web technology.

Widgetbox was created as a result of the work the other founders (Giles Goodwin, Ed Anuff) and I were doing in our former roles at Epicentric, where we developed an enterprise portal platform. While this was great and challenging in its own right, our motivation to start Widgetbox came from a desire to take the most fun part of the technology – the widgets – and make them accessible to non-enterprise users and non-enterprise developers.

We quickly recognized that we could get rid of the traditional enterprise portal server – any page could be a portal page and be replaced with widgets that can be hosted anywhere on the web. This realization, combined with the explosion of social networking, made it evident there was an opportunity to adapt the solution to give users the ultimate social networking experience available. Since we started the company we have seen the opening of platforms on various social networking sites, the uptake of widgets spike even more and a growing number of people using widgets to enhance user experience and increase the ways in which they connect with their friends.

Now we see the industry at an exciting point – widget downloads are at an all time high, prominent brands are creating widgets to drive increased traffic to their sites and advertisers are paying close attention to how to use widgets effectively. Like many in the industry, we are working feverishly to establish a variety of ways to monetize widgets and are in the process of creating some strong partnerships that will allow us to do so. It is certainly an energizing environment and we are finding ourselves working through the night, as many start ups so often do, because there’s so much opportunity to be had.

Specifically we want to provide developers with the go-to platform for building and distributing widgets, and provide consumers with an opportunity to discover and get popular and fresh widgets for their social networking sites, blogs or personal web pages. I think we’ve achieved a part of this by offering the world’s largest and most comprehensive widget gallery.

So what does the future hold? Like the industry we are in, we’ll see Widgetbox evolve and grow at a break-neck pace, enabling more and more users to develop and use widgets easily across multiple platforms. We have developed a solution that allows users to easily create Facebook applications in a matter of minutes and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Given the astoundingly dynamic nature of this sector, our biggest asset is our agility and adaptability. We are confident we can achieve our goals and challenges before us with the culture we have promoted from the beginning, enabling all of us to feel comfortable to speak our minds and throw out ideas that might appear to be a little off the wall but may well be the next big thing.

Drinking the Kool-Aid is a new segment from Rev2 that invites company founders and executives to explain their perspective to Rev2 readers. We invite them to explain the inspiration they had to create their company, how they run it, what they enjoy about working on the web, what their vision is for the future, and anything else they’d like to write about.

In the future, you’ll see more multimedia infused into these pieces as we begin including video and audio from company executives. We hope this segment provides you with a new attitude with which you can view the web companies featured herein. To start us off, we have Michael St. Hilaire, CEO of Fliva, a startup we profiled back in July. Check back next week for more. Thanks!

By Michael St. Hilaire, CEO of Fliva

The original idea for Fliva came about after a friend and I were discussing a sidebar in a magazine asking five questions to five people. Both of us had the same reaction to the questions and answers. Our minds were looking for similarities between the answers to see which person was most ‘like me’, who can I relate to the most. The idea is the answers you give to these questions and the way you answer them says a lot about who you are and how you think. Often these are much more interesting than just simply listing your favorite movies, TV shows, or attempting to write a decent ‘about me’ statement.

In a sense, Fliva is a replacement for the ‘about me’ section of the typical online community like Facebook or MySpace. Although it can be placed anywhere on the page, or on blogs or other websites, it allows your page viewers an insight into your personality they wouldn’t otherwise have.

Our long term vision for Fliva is to use the answers you are giving, and the other information you supply to Fliva to help you connect with others who might be like you. Our aim isn’t to be yet another social network, but to create a framework built on top of all the social networks that allows you to find and connect with cool people wherever their profile might live.

As with all startup companies, we eventually need to be able to pay our own bills and keep ourselves in the latest t-shirts and flip-flops. We are working a strategy with a new advertising company started by a friend of mine (not officially launched yet) to embed their technology for finding connections between people and to be part of their ad network for showing highly targeted ads based on those connections