Restaurant Ratings Made on Google Maps for Android Now Shared on Twitter

Restaurant ratings and reviews you make on Google Maps for Android will now be broadcast on Twitter.
The feature, announced Thursday on the company’s blog, comes as Google Latitude also added new functionality that lets you ping friends you see at nearby places instead of calling them.
Google added a feature to Maps for Android in October that let users read “reviews from around the web” and “reviews from Google users,” just like on the desktop version. Before the announcement today, Maps for Android users’ reviews had previously wound up in Google search results and on Google Hotpot, Google’s Yelp-like rating system, and on Places.
The addition of Twitter is Google’s latest attempt to make further inroads into social media. Hotpot today is a Promoted Trend on Twitter. “We wanted you to be able to share your recommendations even more broadly,” Adam Connors of Google Maps for mobile’s team wrote.
Meanwhile, users who check in using Google Latitude will now be able to ping their friends if they show up nearby. (See picture below.) Such users will “receive an Android notification from you asking them to check in at a place. And when they check in using your request, you’ll get a notification right back so you know which place to go to meet up with them,” Connors writes.