South by Southwest is almost over. While the music events were still under way, many of the techies took off after last weekend, while the fans were left debating whether the Foursquare or the Gowalla party was better and whether all those “check-ins” would ever come back to haunt them. (The people of Austin were probably left wondering why over a hundred car horns were honking like mad, though that wasn’t caused by SXSW pranksters.)

And now all we have is a trail of tweets.

Erin Pettigrew, marketing director at Gawker media, had prime seating for Evan Williams’s keynote address at SXSW, which Ms. Pettigrew likened to the “Internet version of a U2 concert!”

But attendees were seemingly unsatisfied with the information Mr. Williams presented during the panel, including the new @anywhere feature, so the Twitter co-founder offered to answer 10 more questions … via Twitter.

A new service, @venmo, which allows people to exchange money via SMS texts and generated some buzz at this year’s fest, chronicled money exchanges (and even tweeted at yours truly “you can send & receive $ without “trust”ing!” )

Michael Piliero, creative director at FreeAssociation, summed up one of the “next big things” to spring from SXSW — “stickybits.”

So, farewell until next year, SXSW — though as the Beatles sang in “Hello Goodbye” and as Peter Shankman, CEO of The Geek Factory and founder of HARO, tweeted, people don’t say goodbye at SXSW, they say hello — specifically “hello? hello?” and especially if they’re on an iPhone.

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Tweeters were also a-twitter this week about Google warning China that it might shut down its China unit in April; the FCC’s unveiling of its national plan for broadband, which at 360 pages was significantly longer than 140 characters; and Google and Viacom’s accusations over YouTube uploads. O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly found Viacom’s purported YouTube uploads “slimy.”

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And looking ahead to the CTIA Wireless convention next week in Las Vegas, Dan Frommer, editor of Silicon Alley Insider, is looking forward to Apple being the talk of CTIA “even though it’s not attending the conference.”

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