• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, November 1, 2007

Who needs second life when you can immerse yourself in a virtual world populated by Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the Flintstones? Warner Bros. Entertainment announced plans to launch T-Works, an immersive social experience online featuring all of the studio’s key animated characters.

The site will offer everything from classic cartoon episodes to games to the ability to create custom avatars based on Warner Bros. characters to inhabit virtual worlds. Users will also be able to create widgets and other applications that can be incorporated into social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

Warner Bros. also said it’s working with Studio 2.0, it’s digital production arm, to develop a short-form “Batman” series and an untitled project based on the Wizard of Oz, both of which will debut on T-Works.

Gartner media analyst Andrew Frank speculated that T-Works could become a model for studios seeking to monetize intellectual property online. “This is a clear recognition that the entertainment business isn’t just about creating great content anymore. Power is quickly and dramatically shifting to organizations that can also create and manage great social environments for experiencing that content,” he wrote on the Gartner blog.

Whether Warner Bros. can deliver on the promise of its social network is another question. Remember the studio’s 1999  “Entertaindom” portal?