Foursquare is a little over a year old and it seems that it is now looking at $100 million buyout offers from a range of players that are rumored to include Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook. I had long ago predicted that Facebook would buy Foursquare, but Facebook probably doesn't have to if it does location right.

Facebook was also rumored to be looking at Loopt, which is now the equivalent of the Palm of LBS services.

We previously wrote "How ‘Geo-Social Gaming’ Is Changing Local Mobile Search," and Foursquare is the most visible of the companies in the segment. Foursquare would be a tremendous asset to Yahoo or Microsoft, but would they be able to keep its momentum going? That's not clear. Large companies that buy startups often sap the vitality of those smaller companies over time.

It would probably be a different matter at Facebook. But, as I said, Facebook likely doesn't "need" Foursquare, especially if its Open Graph strategy succeeds; it will have more valuable local information than any other player in the market. It could then do a wide range of things with that data. 

Foursquare has recently started paying more attention to the (small) business side of its services. But winning in the SMB market is a tough, long-term slog. It also has a number of high profile deals with cable TV companies and publishers. Those are more promising in terms of near-term and maybe even long-term revenue. 

But the temptation for CEO/co-founder Dennis Crowley is to take the money and run vs. try and build Foursquare into a sustainable business. I can tell you that if I were him I would probably take the money.

Yelp declined to be bought out by Google and instead took a $100 million round of financing. Yelp told me that will partly fuel international growth and engineering hires but a large chunk of that will be devoted to salespeople, needed to obtain ad revenues from SMBs.

If Foursquare continues on as an independent entity it will be going up against that very same Yelp, yellow pages, Google, (maybe Twitter), newspapers and eventually Facebook, among numerous others. Just getting SMB attention is a big challenge, let alone selling anything to them. 

While it's tempting to argue "we don't know how big Foursquare could get" and take a big round, I would bet there will be an acquisition.