SXSW Interactive + Twitter: What You Need to Know

The Interactive portion of this year’s SXSW Festival launched today, and as a result the Twitterverse is ablaze with interesting tidbits of info and a few geeky asides which we’ve rounded up for you below. We’re not too bitter because Weather.com says it’s 42 degrees and raining in Austin. It’s three degrees cooler but crystal clear here in NYC, so suck on that Web 2.0 bitches! And eat some BBQ for us.

1. SXSW 2009 Twitter Visualizer: Kudos to Pepsi for creating a Web site that’s branded and fun to look at.

2. SXSW Bingo: It’s real and there are prizes. If we were in Austin, we’d be all over this.

3. “Dear Facebook employee: If you’re going to do something obvious and cliché like wearing cowboy boots to SXSW’s geek spring break, please have the decency not to tell Twitter about it.”

4. Backlash from the Twitters who aren’t going: #sxswovershare

5. Mashable, Kompolt, PayPal and celebrities including Alec Baldwin, Hayden Panettiere, and a bunch of people we’ve never heard of, are coming together on Monday for the Social Media SmackDown: an event that challenges teams to use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and StumbleUpon to compete to raise the most money for their chosen charities.

6. Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum has channeled his freshman year and launched a SXSW game of Assassins via Twitter. “He even created a bot that manages the game. The iPhone interface for checking up on the game can be found at http://assn.startupdistrict.com/.”

7. A pic of Jon Favreau in a bathroom on the way to Austin. No joke.

8. Mat Honan’s fake Twitter coverage of SXSW.