It’s that time of year again. The online Superbowl party that Mullen started three years ago to celebrate the age of Twitter is well into development. If you remember, we began our annual project when there weren’t very many ad types on Twitter. In 2009, most of the industry was still like “huh?”

A few of us at Mullen, the kind folks at Radian 6, and some friends like Sally Hogshead and Lisa Hickey made the effort to get ad land excited. We launched what was then called Trash Talk from the Twitter Section, shared instructions for how to sign up for Twitter, and encouraged people to open accounts. Today it’s hard to imagine that Twitter needed an introduction as recently as three years ago.

Now here we are for our fourth anniversary and we’re excited to introduce some new features. For starters, we’ve made the site, brandbowl2012.com, more interactive. (Note that at this posting it re-directs to last year’s site.) For the first time, users will be able to compare brands head to head in a statistical showdown. Whose ads are getting more attention or more favorable reaction? Brandbowl knows.

We’ve isolated a box at the top of the page, held high by a digital fan, to feature the best tweets of the game. Post something particularly insightful or clever and you could find your tweet featured atop the stream for everyone to see.

Brandbowl 2012 also has some new data to share. This year’s analytics will track the geo location of tweets and also the gender of the participant. Might be interesting to see comparisons between the sexes when it comes to talking about Superbowl ads.

The mobile experience will be better, too. Let’s face it, there’s likely to be more people watching the game with a smartphone in hand than a laptop resting on their knees. You’ll be able to check live rankings and post instantly from your iPhone or Android. Given that it’s a site, not an app, it will work everywhere.

And finally, we’ve been approached by Billboard, which wants to get in on the action. So we’ve offered them the featured tweet board for the half-time show. Madonna better watch out. Billboard knows what it’s talking about when it comes to reviewing music and performances.

Once again, our partner Radian 6 is back with its sentiment data and analytics. And for the second year in a row Boston.com is hosting the site and helping to promote it.  Given that Twitter’s active user base continues to grow and that social media advertising couch critics is an expanding population, we expect to get some pretty good data.

Hope to see you there. On brandbowl2012.com. Using the easy to remember hashtag #brandbowl. I know who I’m rooting for. The creative.

If you need a reminder or are interested in what this is all about, here’s a video recap of last year’s effort.

On his Posterous blog, Christian Madden captures a couple of his favorite new technologies.

And at Creativity_Unbound, Edward Boches reminds us of the value of play.  He also promises to start sharing more organized bookmarks and recaps the research that inspired the Rocky Biscuits buzz in the UK last fall. If you want more, you can also check out his guest post at Radian 6’s blog regarding Pepsi’s withdrawal from the SuperBowl. “In case it’s not obvious, this isn’t about bailing on the Superbowl.  It’s about embracing social media and understanding that when it comes to brands and products, customers now depend on each other to connect, share, learn and discover.”

Finally, if you haven’t yet checked out The Next Great Generation, you might want to. The blog, crowdsourced from a staff of Gen Y writers all across the country, posts new content daily and this week has two young reporters sending dispatches from CES.   Enjoy.