I’m feeling the pressure. I’ve set my self this task of understanding the dynamics and value of Personal Networks. And – it’s complicated.

I started the process by devouring as many books as I could on the subject – the bookshelf continues to fill, but I seem to find less and less time to absorb in this format.

In some ways, book reading has been replaced by the wonderful world of blogs and twitter. I’m spending time filtering the feed of information – and reading up-to-date opinion. Fascinating – but still the clouds aren’t clearing.

The most satisfying is getting to talk to people on-line (and occasionally face to face) – and this conjures up a whole other set of questions or investigations. For example, one of my new on-line friends (not mentioned yesterday – as he has 3 twitter profiles and I think he likes to be a little “enigmatic”) – said I might be better spending time with philosophy to understand Personal Networks. He said: “This is because philosophy is, long term, probably the best discipline for ‘thinking beyond existing concepts’ and then coming back with new ones that can then be tried out to see if they make better sense of the data.”

I’m beginning to not only think that this is complicated – but that it will be a rather long job!

If you have read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”, your will remember the “10,000-Hour Rule”. Gladwell claims that the key to success is a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

Seth Godin has a view on Gladwell’s “Outlier”:

“You win when you become the best in the world, however ‘best’ and ‘world’ are defined by your market. In many mature markets, it takes 10,000 hours of preparation to win because most people give up after 5,000 hours. That’s the only magic thing about 10k… it’s a hard number to reach, so most people bail.”

So by my estimation, I’ve so far given 1,200 hours of my time to the investigation of Personal Networks – only 8,800 hours to go! So by 2014, I might be able to give you an authoritative view! Wow – it’s complicated…

Well I love chocolate – and I’m fascinated by Personal and Social Networks … so what could be better than a new up and coming venture called Social Chocolate?

The venture seems to have gathered a team of really high-profile folk. The leader is Creative Director, Jane McGonigal – you might have seen her on TED Talks. Jane’s profile is worth a read:

“Jane is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games, or ARGs – games designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. Her #1 goal in life is to see a game designer nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. She is the Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future and the author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.”

Also, do take the time to listen to her TED talk – “Gaming can make a Better World”. It’s full of wow statistics that really make you think about how we might be able to solve important problems (and have fun).

Back to chocolate though… I know that was the part of this post’s headline that really captured your interest….

Social Chocolate’s website says that: “We are in the middle of developing radically new social adventure games based on breakthrough scientific findings from psychology, neuroscience, and sociology.” I like their profile on Twitter more:

“We’re making worldchanging games powered by the science of positive emotion and social connection.”

The basis seems to be that through gaming you get rewards – and chocolate is a reward/treat too. I can’t disagree with that – I have Boggle and Fruit& Nut obsessions! The theory is that we can use these fun things and rewards (basically great gaming) to encourage people to collaborate on-line to solve the real problems of the world. When you consider the amount of time invested playing games – and imagine this energy channeled in to changing real worlds – you can get the connection.

Jane has some interesting “parallel stats”

* These days a person spends an average of 10,000 hours by the age 21 playing games
* To get through all levels of school in the US a student spends 10,080 hours in lessons
* Malcolm Gladwell puts forward in his book “The Outliers” that a virtuoso in any subject needs to spend 10,000 hours

Social Chocolate seems a very bright idea. Take a look at the game on their home page – and see if you can unlock their “Secret Wall”. I seem to have got stuck at the very last level – after spending way too much time playing. However, it has reinforced my knowledge of hubs, nodes, edges, connectors, density of networks, etc in a very practical way.

Good luck to Social Chocolate – go and have a play with their initial “teaser” game. It will help you and me to start conversing in the “language” of Personal Networks – while having fun playing a game. That’s a start…