This morning, Mike Arrington posted an impassioned plea to Foursquare not to sell out to Yahoo in a post called “Don’t Sell Out, Foursquare. Not Now. Not To Yahoo”:

It is becoming alarmingly apparent that Foursquare is strongly considering a sale to Yahoo. As of the end of last week they had put the venture capitalists vying for their attention on ice. Those VCs happily provided term sheets valuing the company at $80 million or so. But in the meantime, Yahoo and maybe others expressed interest in the company, and are reportedly offering way above that $80 million.

There are so many reasons why this deal shouldn’t happen.

Funny thing is, Ben Parr this weekend said exactly the same thing in a post entitled “Dear Foursquare: This Is Not the Right Time to Sell.” The fact that both of these tech pundits are dead wrong on this (and many other things) isn’t the funny part – that sort of ceases to be funny after you notice their flawed analysis a couple dozen times. The fact that they’re both saying the exact same thing is what’s most amusing to me.

Mike said this morning: “Yahoo’s senior team is grasping at straws, and they desperately want to find a way to stay relevant. But this is not it.”

Ben said yesterday: “Yahoo’s track record is mixed.”

Mike said this morning: “Yahoo is a horrendous choice for Foursquare. It’s where startups go to die. They’ve bought so many companies that were so promising, only to see them wither on the vine.”

Ben said yesterday: “Yahoo’s track record on acquisitions is also hit-or-miss. Since its inception, Yahoo has acquired more than 55 companies. Some, like Flickr, are running strong, while others such as Geocities, Broadcast.com and del.icio.us have either languished or been shut down.”

Mike said this morning: “You only sell now if you think your business doesn’t have legs. If the Foursquare team believes in their product, they should stay in the game.”

Ben said yesterday: “Is a $100 to $150 million payday a smarter deal than staying independent and taking a chance with the market? To answer that question, you have to weigh potential against chance. Is the potential growth of the company worth the risk associated with trying to go it alone with Foursquare? How big could Foursquare potentially be?”

Mike said this morning:

“The Dodgeball/Google debacle should have given founder Dennis Crowley enough of a taste of what happens to most companies when they get acquired. Dennis, remember when you wrote this – “It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.” You sold your startup too soon once before. Why do it again now?”

Ben said yesterday:

Unfortunately for Crowley, he’s very familiar with the latter. Crowley’s last company, Dodgeball, was in many ways the predecessor to Foursquare: It was a location-aware social network for finding interesting venues and notifying friends via text.

In 2005, Google acquired Crowley’s startup. Instead of placing resources behind Dodgeball to develop its social networking capabilities, Google left it to languish in obscurity until it eventually shut down in 2009.

Mike said this morning:

“Facebook and Twitter hitting the geo space must be a scary thing for a small startup to contemplate. But there’s real momentum and that intangible buzz behind your product right now. Play this out. In ten years, you’ll be glad you did. Unless you’re broke then because Foursquare failed, of course, and bitter that you didn’t take the money from Yahoo when it was offered. But there’s a reason why you became an entrepreneur and didn’t just stay a mid level developer grunt at a variety of large organizations. You have the fire to change the world. So go do it.”

Ben said yesterday:

“Look: Foursquare is not my company, and I’d have a hard time making a decision if someone waved $125 million in my face. But if Foursquare’s passion and goal is to make location-based social networking mainstream, then it’s better off as an independent company where it can follow that vision unwaveringly. If the groundswell of grassroots support that created Foursquare Day is any indication, the company has far more potential than the figures that are being thrown out now. This is the time to put the pedal to the metal, not the time to sell.”

You get my point. Either by some alarming lack of connectedness, Mike Arrington has never logged onto Twitter and seen a Mashable retweet (which I find difficult to believe, since this article alone was shared around 1,500 times between Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz), or even more alarmingly Mike is now taking his analysis cues from Ben Parr.

Either way, they’re both wrong.  As I went into in great detail after SxSW, the location based networks wars are a farce, and while both Gowalla and Foursquare will see good growth despite each other, they’ll both eventually be replaced by a feature rollout by Facebook, Twitter or Google.

It will happen.

If you’ve got an offer on the table, Foursquare, take it.  This is your pay day.

Editor’s Note: Photo credits to Dean Terry. –mrh]