Not a day goes by without it becoming clearer that IBM should sell Lotus (and that Microsoft should stop trying to sell SharePoint as a collaboration tool).

Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb posed an interesting question--whether FriendFeed is part of the information overload problem, or part of the solution.

This will be settled rather quickly. People will figure out how to fine-tune apps like FriendFeed and Twitter to suit their needs, and they will bring that knowledge to the workplace.

To date, the enterprise has tried to keep information in a lockbox, and vendors like IBM and Microsoft are twisting themselves into knots trying to sell products that offer both the freedom of collaboration and the constraints of information security.

But that won't work because people don't want to collaborate that way. This is why knowledge management apps never worked either. They are too oppressive. But smart business leaders want their employees to collaborate more than they want to control what they do, and so this situation is evolving. If you don't believe me, check out this blog from an employee at EMC. Either you think Joe Tucci is a New Age kind of guy, or you have to believe that the times, they are a changing.

Even the White House is getting into the game.

Meanwhile, the new guys on the block aren't standing still. Facebook is adding new features to help users distinguish friend-friends from work-friends.

And despite word that the VC community is tiring of social network startups, those guys just keep on coming.

Furthermore, writes Sarah Perez, social networks are poised to become the content distribution platforms of tomorrow.

In Homer's Odyssey, people ate fruit from the lotus tree that made them pleasantly drowsy, kind of like the sugar coma most people get after lunch, causing them to fall asleep at their desks until someone IMs them with the latest score.

This is why the suits worry about more such distractions, but the truth is that Twitter and FriendFeed are examples of a new generation of social network that will empower people by enabling them to take in greater quantities of the kinds of information they want and need, and to share what they know more easily and quickly than before.