My newest "Message is the Medium" column is up at Knowledge Management Magazine's destionaKM, called Contact Unmanagement. I profile Plaxo, which is an Outlook-integrated peer-to-peer contact management solution.

Plaxo begins with contact unmanagement, an insidious and viral starting point for what could rapidly become social network unmanagement. Where better to manage the flow of social capital than directly in Outlook? Imagine the point perhaps not too long in the future where the majority of Outlook users have opted to install the free Plaxo solution. (In my case, 7% of my contacts are already using Plaxo.)

I bet Plaxo will soon offer new fee-based services, such as social networking wired into Outlook. That global, peer-to-peer social network is just crying out to be leveraged in more sophisticated ways. And (oh, by the way) those competing services don't offer the initial hook that makes Plaxo so appealing: they don't automatically keep your contacts updated.