Companies like Foursquare and Gowalla are trying to build businesses – and venture businesses no less – based on helping people share their real world locations.

Local business review juggernaut Yelp recently bolted on social location check-ins to their iPhone app.  Twitter and Facebook are almost certain to turn on some sort of location based functionality soon.

So what will be the winning approach?  Will social location be won by a point solution that does one thing and one thing well, or it will be won by a company providing a more full featured suite of social features?

There’s a fascinating discussion going on about this very topic on Jon Steinberg’s blog.

Jon’s position, and that of most of the (perhaps NY / Foursquare biased) commenters, is that he expects Yelp to struggle.  Doing some back of the envelope math, he calculates Yelp will need about 10% of their iPhone users to start using the functionality just to catch Foursquare’s usage – something he sees as a daunting task.

Foursquare investor Fred Wilson, admittedly biased, has this to say:

“we’ve also noticed that point solutions often beat more full featured ones. not sure whether that will be the case here, but dennis and the team are focused 100% on this stuff. the big companies, and yelp is just one of them that are coming into this space, aren’t and won’t be.”

A look around the social media landscape certainly does show some examples of point solutions beating full featured ones:

Point solution YouTube whupped Google Video in video sharing.

Point solution Craigslist whupped everybody else in classifieds.

But there are also instances of the full featured sites carrying the day:

Facebook seems to have won photos, events, and could be on their way to winning status updates.

I’m personally of the opinion that social location will, and should be, a feature on many existing sites.  Location adds context to many different web verticals – reviews, search, blog posts, photos, videos, etc.  Furthermore, I think the Yelp implementation is pretty damn good, and I think it’s a logical extension of their existing business.

That being said, the question of “where” strikes me as big enough to support a couple of standalone business.

Take, for example, the question of “where are all my friends right now?”  Sure, people could find and share location using Twitter, but the experience would be cluttered by all the other, non location oriented tweets.  For me, the question of “where” is important enough to maintain a membership on several different location point solutions (and to write a blog about them).

So there you have it.  The answer to “Is Social Location a Feature or a Business?” is a resounding yes.  Social location will make the experience on many social media services richer and better.  But I believe the problem that social location is addressing is important and universal enough to support a number of standalone businesses.

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