Google Places recently enabled its users to easily access all content related to their location: ratings and reviews of those particular places.

When users visit their Google Places profile, they will see a link where they can find all their ratings and reviews. The feed is private by default, but users are free to share it if they want.

Google Places also made it possible for users to write reviews and put ratings on Google the places they’ve stumbled upon, whether in real life or on the web. To do this, users should follow these simple steps:

1. Copy the URL of the location you want to rate or review.

2. On the Google Places search box, paste the URL you copied. Google will display location cards that match the feed.

3. You can click on the stars at the bottom of the box to rate place.

4. After rating, a link will appear that says “Write A Review.” Click on the link if you want to write some tips and insights about the place.

Indeed, users can now easily access and/or share their two cents’ on their favorite (or least favorite) locations in just a few clicks, be it around their neighborhood or overseas. As rating apps become more widespread, it becomes imperative that a business perform well. Every misstep can be read by thousands of potential customers and each satisfied customer could send those same thousands to your door.

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This minor change reflects Google’s renewed focus on providing better localized content, especially for mobile applications. Google’s Places app, with its integrated search, now poses a challenge for other location and LBS apps. It’s only a matter of time before Google adds a “local deals” feature to the app as well.

Dan Gilmartin of WHERE has stated that their company has set itself on the path of becoming a content-rich recommendations engine in order to differentiate themselves from the crowd of providers that offer “commodity local search” on smartphones and other mobile devices.

This means that as various companies vie for greater usage of their mobile apps, they’re going to have to come up with unique features or content that will set them apart immediately from the others.

This is what Citysearch is attempting to achieve with its very own Deals app while AT&T Interactive is currently dabbling with deals and events while going for what they describe as a “more branded” UI for its apps.

Publishers are continuing to try to add social features to their mobile apps while keeping the mantra of “so-lo-mo” (social, local, mobile) alive and well. Even Google has now begun to aggressively push their HotPot recommendation engine.

All told, the result is a lot more pressure for both publishers and developers who must become innovative with their apps while addressing the problems of the user. One of the most stubborn problems that has yet to be effectively dealt with is to streamline the task of decision-making for the user, as they currently have to sift through dozens of reviews before being able to make a single decision.

Take the age-old question of where to eat when outside the house. It’s a hard enough question to answer on your own, but if you ask a group, everybody ends up pulling out their mobile devices and sorting through the options. The process often ends up fruitless as the group invariably falls back on some good restaurant one of them happens to know in the area. Real world situations like this present a challenge for the way designers and programmers create the next generation of apps.

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