The social location landscape changed dramatically this weekend.

Yelp, the 800 pound gorilla of local social media, revamped its popular iPhone app in order to let users check in to locations.

So how will this affect social location services like Foursquare and Gowalla?

I think it’s a devastating development for them, a brutal punch in the gut.  It’s not a surprise that Yelp should choose to implement check-ins – indeed, check-ins are a perfect extension of local business reviews.  In some ways a check-in IS a review – an implicit endorsement of a local business, in the same way that sales data is a vote of confidence for a product (see Blippy).  And it’s much easier to check-in to a venue from a mobile phone than it is to write a review of that venue.

But what is a surprise is how fast Yelp moved.  To roll out as polished a product as their most recent iPhone release, they had to have begun development months ago.  And the fact that they chose to risk totally revamping a highly successful and popular iPhone app, as opposed to building a separate app, shows just how big Yelp is betting on check-ins.

In the TechCrunch article covering this news, MG Siegler suggests that this development doesn’t necessarily mean lights out for Gowalla and Foursquare:

“No one is quite sure how well the concept of check-ing-in will work when tacked on to an existing social network.”

This is a reasonable point.  Yelp’s social graph doesn’t reflect real life as accurately as say Facebook’s.  And will people share their location with people who are not their friends in real life?

So far, the answer would appear to be a resounding yes.  A quick look on Twitter search shows that people are already using this feature in droves.

A glimpse at the last two hours of data on Twitter search show about 60 Yelp check-ins – about one every two minutes.  Foursquare is claiming a check-in every second.

But the Yelp data is an enormously understated snapshot of the people actually using the feature – it only includes people that A) that have Twitter accounts; B) people who have synced those Twitter accounts to Yelp; C) people that chose to push the check-in to Twitter (the default is NOT to do this); and D) people that have downloaded the Yelp app update.

My guess is that just 24 hours after pushing this update, Yelp is already may soon be closing in on the check-in volume of Foursquare.  And this is before most Yelp users are even aware of the feature.  There has been no Yelp newsletter sent out announcing the feature, and the only coverage so far seems to be on the tech blogs.  What will Yelp’s check-in volume look like when all 1.25M of its mobile users are aware of the feature?

Besides mapping a lot more connections between Yelp users and venues, this new feature is almost certainly going to drive Yelp a bunch more traffic via its Twitter and Facebook integration.  Expect to see Yelp’s traffic get a nice bounce.

But back to Foursquare and Gowalla.  What can they do to avoid being brute forced out of existence?

Here are a couple of options:

- Go international.  How do you say Mayor in Chinese?
– Push the gameplay angle.  Neither Yelp nor Google seem to have any interest in the game dynamics piece of the puzzle.
– Find a niche and focus all distribution, gameplay, and design on that niche.  check-ins for clubbers.  check-ins for coffee drinkers.  A white label check-in app.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that a change in direction may be required.

And as an aside, there is a fascinating food chain battle going on.  Google, who nearly acquired Yelp a few weeks ago, is putting tremendous pressure on Yelp via it’s new “near me now” feature.  Yelp has pivoted swiftly and has quickly added social location to its own service, in turn putting pressure on Gowalla and Foursquare.  How will these tiny startups respond?

So there you have it.  Yelp has moved quickly and decisively into the social location space, and there is almost certainly a lot of soul searching going on in Austin and New York.

Even more than Facebook or Twitter, I saw Yelp as the single most dangerous competitor in the social location space.  And now they’re here, faster than most people expected.  And everybody else is going to have adjust.

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