Disney has finally lifted the curtain on the big Disney.com overhaul. The launch was teased in Bog Iger's keynote at CES. I opine on it in my column in this week's Advertising Age, however I didn't see it live until just now. Unfortunately, it's a walled garden that does nothing to bridge to other communities where people already publish. They clearly don't get what Web 2.0 is all about.
One of the big features that Iger touted in the keynote are Disney's widgets. Well, Disney.com definitely has widget functionality in Disney XD. It looks and feels a lot like Mac OS X Tiger. Perhaps Disney was influenced by having Steve Jobs on their board.
However, unlike YourMinis or any other similar platform, you can't add your own content. Oddly enough you can do this on My ESPN, also a Disney site. They let you add the RSS feed of your choice.
What's worse, there's no way to take the Disney widgets and embed them in your own site. Just think of how many millions of citizen marketers would be thrilled to do so! I realize this site is targeted for the younger ones, but some of the TV and movie content is for teens. And many pre-teens and teens have their own blogs and MySpace pages. Look at Jeff Jarvis' son Jake for example. He's a wizard.
As I wrote in the AdAge piece, in this new era Disney's greatest opportunities online lie not in creating bigger walled gardens but in spreading its content far and wide. This means giving rabid fans the content they want where they want it. Yes, Disney needs to get comfortable seeing Mickey and crew on blogs and YouTube. It also means that Disney will need to allow people to adapt its work so they can express their own creativity. That didn't happen and it's too bad.
