While in Orlando, for IBM’s huge Social Conference, I met with the IBM Japan team on their new use of Facebook/Twitter/Twicsy for driving interest in IBM XPages. 

The character is call IKEYAMA-Kun, who is the Chief Engineer for XPages in Japan.

A very shy guy who prefers to develop XPages applications to provide the Web 2.0 experience to customers. However, part of his mission is to reach out to developer colleagues in Japan to evangelize what XPages is and what benefits it can bring. Also, with limited XPages updates in Japanese, he acts as the information bridge

IKEYAMA-Kun facebook page acts as the entrance to reach developers not only with classic IBM background but also JAVA developers and introduce XPages. Once we reach / make them interested in XPages, our goal is to bring them to our XPages technical community on developerWorks where deeper discussions and information sharing are conducted. Eventually, we hope that, a lot of valuable XPages applications are developed by XPages community members, so Notes/Domino business will keep momentum.

In just a few weeks, IBM XPages Japan community has grown to over 280 people. A very interactive community indeed. Some developers, all new to XPages, have shared sample demo applications which they had built.

Check it out here!    http://www.facebook.com/xpagesjapan?sk=app_216973955007200