While I have been enjoying reading the stream on FriendFeed, and keeping up with my friends locations on Brightkite, and the minutia of their day on Twitter, it isn’t very productive.

For example, I spent about two hours today, reading content, posting content, and commenting on other people’s content, which would have been fine, except I probably should have been doing client work instead.

So the question is, where is the balance point?   How do small business owners know when they are spending too much time on social networks?  My excuse?  It is research, I am trying to find out which tools will work best for my clients.  But the truth is, it is also fun so I am going to keep looking for a small business application to justify the time I spend.