Rate and review places in your foursquare history with Google Places

Google Places announced tonight a new feature that lets you import your foursquare checkin history and quickly rate and review the places you’ve been. The places you rate influence the recommendations Places provides for you.

With the new feature, you simply paste any GeoRSS feed into the Places search box and Google will attempt to “show you place cards that line up, as best as we’re able to determine, with the places in the public geo feed.” Foursquare provides a GeoRSS feed on your feeds page. It only provides a few checkins by default, but you can import more by adding “?count=1000″ (or whatever number you want) to the end of the URL when you paste it in the Google search box.

The feature was first reported by Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb.

Last year we detailed a method for displaying your foursquare checkins on a Google Map using foursquare’s GeoRSS feed. This takes it a few steps further by matching it up to actual places in the Google Places database and then presents them in a way that rates them very quickly. Why should you rate the places you visit?

Every time you rate a place on Google, we get a better understanding of your likes and dislikes: sushi or steak; coffee or tea; a quiet room with a view, or somewhere near the pulse of city nightlife. Once we can discern your tastes, you’ll start to see recommendations in your search results of places chosen specially for you, with explanations of why you might like them. As you rate more places, you’ll see more and better recommendations anywhere you search for local results on Google — at your computer or while on the go with your phone. — Places Help

The ratings and recommendations were recently rolled into Places from Google’s Hotpot product.

Have you used Google Places? What do you think of the change?