While it apparently went over the head of celebrity host Billy Crystal, IBM execs have been extolling the virtues of twittering and tweeting at IMPACT 2009, its annual SOA (solutions-oriented architecture) conference. On day two the company made a couple of announcements about expanding its social media offerings for partners and developers.

"We're the first vendor to release social media training and social media tools," said IBM's Sandy Carter, VP, SOA & WebSphere marketing, strategy and channels.

The announcements include: SOAsocial, the first social network created for the SOA community; IBM WebSphere Application Server Developer Edition, a free tool for simplifying access to the application server; IBM Spaces, micro-Websites focused on specific software project, development activity, user group community, technical expert or any other technical subject of interest; updates to the SOA sandbox, the hands-on environment for developers; SOA Business Catalog has been redesigned to provide access to more than 23,500 tested SOA assets; and the new release of Innov8, 2.0, IBM's 'serious game for business training that now has an online collaboration feature as well as two new scenarios and enhancements to the original customer service scenario.

>> Click here to read the full report