In 2009 there was a lot of buzz about the potential opportunities offered by location-based applications and functionality for local marketing use. What if a coupon could be delivered via your cell phone as you walked by a Starbucks?

“Geo” became not only a big buzzword, but also gathered some real momentum towards making that “what if” a reality with the launch of popular mobile applications like Foursquare — a location based social network that incorporates gaming elements and Sherpa — an app that constantly learns your favorite locations and starts to aggregate them.

You’ve probably heard that 2010 will be the year of mobile, and might be vaguely wondering what this geolocation fanfare is all about, and more specifically, why it might become important to pay attention to from an organizational point of view.

Well, let’s start with the fact that there is a lot of money being pumped into it. The geolocation trend is hot and investors are happily investing big bucks into location-based services like Foursquare and SCVNGR. Gowalla, Outside.in and Hot Potato. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

So it looks like 2010 is going to be the year when location-based functionality will become not just real, but commonplace — from mobile apps to consumer devices, even to web services are all going to be geo-enabled.

As of today, Twitter now lets people see  maps of where geotagged tweets were sent from on its website. They briefly turned this feature yesterday, but then shut it off again. It’s now turned on permanently.

In November 2009, Twitter enthusiastically launched a location API that let users opt-in to having their messages annotated with their exact locations. And startups like Tweetdeck and Seemic were quick to build features around the new data. But it’s taken months for Twitter to finally show geotagged tweets on its own web site.

And Facebook will add friend location information starting next month, according to a report in The New York Times. To be introduced at the F8 developer conference in April, Facebook status geolocation will enable you to share with your friends the location from where you submitted your update.

Just in time for the SXSWi hype later this week.