Warner Bros. Consumer Products · Tweety.com · 2008-2010
The slumber party that never happened.
In 2008 the team designed a full social network for kids around Tweety Bird. COPPA reality arrived mid-project. What shipped instead was a de-fanged, admin-controlled promo platform live in 12 countries that collected nothing at all.
- Social Network (killed)
- COPPA
- 12-Country Platform (shipped)
- CMS
The vision · August 2008
Every brand wanted its own kids’ social network
The pitch was a tween-girl social destination in the middle of the Club Penguin gold rush, benchmarked in a Virtual Worlds spreadsheet against Habbo, Hello Kitty’s virtual world, and Zanpo. At the center sat the Tweety Viral Lounge.
Invite-only Lounges
Group spaces you had to be invited into. The pitch, verbatim: "Like the fun of a virtual slumber party, friends can invite each other to share and play in this exclusive but collective forum for friends."
Group chat and messaging
The 2008 ambition was free-form: group chat, private messaging, and "Tweeter" status updates that could be pushed to a phone as a text.
Wish List
Kids could email a list of product wishes straight to their parents, folding the brand catalog into the social loop.
Tweety Companion
A dress-up avatar tour guide that walked new members through the world, with a proposed A.I. chat option layered on top.
“It will be a safe haven for children to interact, as parents approve interactivity.”
The homework · December 2008
Then we read the law
The team pulled the FTC’s full COPPA Rule text and studied imbee.com, a kids’ network whose parent company had just been fined by the FTC under COPPA. To understand the verifiable-parental-consent flow, I made a child test account on imbee under a fake handle and walked the whole thing myself.
FTC v., parent company of imbee.com, fined under COPPA.
Child test account created · username
Verifiable parental consent request sent to
Names, handles, and emails redacted. The rule was to cite the homework, not show the people in it.
Birth month and year only. Nothing more.
Under-13 requires a parent email with allow or deny, listing exactly what data was collected.
“There will be no text entry.”
“Don’t use your real name! Use something fun and simple.”
The signature move
What COPPA kept
Flip the toggle to see what each planned 2008 feature became once the compliance redesign landed.
- LoungeInvite-only virtual slumber-party spacesFor release 2.0The release never came.
- ChatFree-form group chat and messagingThere will be no text entry.Dialogue picked from dropdowns only.
- ProfilesKid profiles, friend lists, status updatesGoneNo profiles, no friends graph.
- WidgetsUsers add and arrange their own widgetsShifted to the administratorUser agency removed entirely.
- Data collectedNames, photos, uploads, status textsZeroBirth month and year only, and only to gate age.
Even the contract couldn’t consistently name the law it was trying to comply with, in one place adhering to “the standards of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA)” while citing COPPA correctly elsewhere. The statute is COPPA: the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
It actually shipped!
What shipped instead
Not a failure. A different product.
tweety.com plus .mx, .es and .fr went live in production across a 12-country rollout, localized as Piolín in Spanish, with Portuguese and Tagalog translations. Seven administrator-controlled widgets shipped, Tweety Paint reborn as a scrapbook among them, on a Full Site vs Partner Site model with retailer-exclusive slots. It ran on Rackspace across three regional servers, and the blueprint was meant to be reused for Scooby, Looney Tunes, Batman, and Tom & Jerry.
“Creating their own Tweety account and establishing a database of potential consumers for each territory.”
The motive was data. The compliant build that actually shipped collected zero bytes of it.
Process · plan to production
From a widget map to a live widget
The pipeline, left to right: the planned widget set, the designed widget, and the same widget administered inside the CMS.
- Featured Content
- Tweety 411 News
- Downloads
- Friendship & Gifts
- Polls
- Horoscopes
- Advice
- Learn How
- Heroines
- Tweety Paint
- Lounge
- Friends & Profiles
The activity diagram and the registration wireframe that sat between plan and design are archival assets not yet recovered, so this band narrates the steps it can show rather than reconstructing the ones it cannot.
Production reality
From August 2008 to pitches in 2010
- Aug 18, 2008Main-site contract signed
- Dec 2008COPPA homework: FTC Rule pulled, imbee.com studied
- Dec 12, 2008Pivot proposal
- Jan 28, 2009Planned launch date (never met)
- Mar 2009Repositioned as a standalone promo platform
- Aug 26, 200912-country standalone contract
- Through Dec 2009Live production sites and maintenance
- Into 2010Final widget-bundle pitches
- Flash 9
- Flex / MySQL
- Multi-level CMS
- ffmpeg video pipeline
- Rackspace, 3 regional servers
- Localization in 12 countries
- Downloads targeting PSP and iPod
The lesson
What happens when marketing gets ahead of legal
The team was not cynical. The compliant design was genuinely thoughtful: a real attempt to build something safe for kids inside a law the industry barely understood. The problem was never intent. Once the parental-consent flow, the data listing, and the “no text entry” chat were all in place, the thing that made it a social network was gone, and the risk math still did not work.
The safest kids’ social network turned out to be no social network at all. Producing that call, and then repurposing the work into something that could actually ship, taught me more than any launch would have.
- RoleProducer
- Agency65 Media
- ClientWarner Bros. Consumer Products
- Years2008-2010
Build a global kids’ social brand destination in the Club Penguin gold rush, under a law the industry barely understood.
Do the regulatory homework mid-flight, redesign for compliance, and when the risk still outweighed the reward, repurpose the work into a shippable international promo platform.
The social network never launched. A 12-country, zero-data-collection platform did, with a CMS blueprint Warner Bros. could reuse across properties.
The product that died, and the platform that shipped.