The SXSW 2011 conference is kicking off, and that means lots and lots, and lots and lots (and lots) of parties to attend, people to meet, companies to watch, and parties to attend.  One you should definitely check out is the second annual Tech Cocktail event, which will feature more than 30 early stage start-ups from the Microsoft BizSpark-sponsored SXSW Accelerator program.

Posterous is hyped up, with a special version of its app dubbed Posterous Events, which lets users create a Posterous site around an event – SXSW of course. Using the start-up’s iPhone app can create a .posterous site for a specific geological location and post and upload media formatted into a slideshow – a neat app indeed.

And among the many companies looking to raise buzz will be two particularly interesting ones focusing on the social chart – Umagram and Connect.me.

Umagram is a platform built by David Rostan (who also maintains another start-up called Socialyell.com) which enables users to tweet private message links to people they don’t follow. The service cuts straight to the private conversation when a user signs in to the site using their Twitter ID, and composes a tweet mentioning the account they’re interested in contracting. Umagram then carries out a pretty simple – yet genius – concept which lets users send messages with unlimited length and even attachments.

“Umagram posts the tweet with a unique link to the conversation on its messaging platform. Because users need to sign in to Umagram with a specific Twitter identity, only people named in the initial tweet have access to the conversation.”

Umagram is one thing, but what’s been really getting a lot of attention, expert commentary and even 40,000 sign-ups is Connect.me – a 2 and a half page-website. Connect.me a new social media app which used a different take on its early invite process, asking users to hand over Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn private data in exchange for early updates for the site launch.  Within 24 hours of sending out its first invite, 20k users had sent in requests, raising red flags as Sophos.  It has been suspected to be a scam by many prominent commentators, including Sophos security expert Graham Cluley, who had this to say in a blog post:

“Why should I let these guys and grant them permission to post to my Twitter or Facebook pages? I don’t even know what their product is supposed to be!”

Well as it turns out Connect.me seems to be legitimate, and all that buzz is simply result of Twitter being Twitter. Business Insider reports the founders of stealth start-up was planning to launch at SXSW, and sent an invite to friends and family to check out the fruits of their labor.

On the bigger picture, what Connect.me got is a lot of pre-launch buzz from several major media outlets. Now that it turns out it’s probably not a scam, we can expect a pretty interesting demo at SXSW.