May 19, 2011 14:20 GMT  ·  By

Google talks a lot about data portability and, for the most part, tries to own up to that talk. There are easy ways of getting most of your data out of many Google services. One of the latest entries, though the announcement doesn't do a good job at explaining this aspect, is Google Places which now has a feed of all of your reviews and ratings.

The Atom feed enables your friends to keep up with your whereabouts and your reviews, but it also means that the data could be imported by any other app or web service.

The cool thing is, Google is also enabling users to import their data into Places from services such as Foursquare or other places that offer a GeoRSS/Atom feed.

"Since your reviews are your reviews, we figured giving you access to all this content in one convenient way might be helpful. Now, when you visit your profile on Google Places, you’ll find a link along the left that points to an Atom feed of all the place ratings and reviews you’ve created on Google," Juan Silveira, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.

The feed lists everything you've ever rated on Google and it serves several purposes. For one, it's the first time all of this data is presented in a structured way, so it's easy to check out where you've been.

Another use is to enable any of your friends to see where you've been hanging out lately. Though, why you'd want that is another matter.

And you'd have to have some pretty loyal friends, or maybe overprotective parents/significant others, for them to be interested in every step you take.

But probably the most interesting use is for exporting data from Google and moving it to the location service of your choice.

Some users will also be interested in getting their data from other places. Any service that offers a feed for your checkins, reviews, ratings and so on, can be imported into Google Places and the service will do its best to match data to Google's list of known places.

"Just find the URL of a public GeoRSS/Atom feed that contains place information you care about. This could be anything from a feed of your Foursquare check-ins to a My Map you may have created years ago. Paste the URL into the search box on Google Places," Googler explained.