Fortune's Tech Skeptic also lambasts "contact unmanagement" services in his "Fearless Predictions":

"Contact-freshening services Plaxo and GoodContacts experience explosive growth as folks realize that signing up is the only way to stop those annoying e-mails from people they cannot remember who are asking them to update their contact info. Once other tech companies see their success, this particular brand of "annoyance abeyance marketing" sweeps the Internet and soon Amazon and Google and all the rest are devising ways for us to pay them to stop bothering us."

My model is to ping folks for update immediately after they initiate an email exchange with me for the first time, or following an email exchange when we haven't exchanged emails for some time. I think that etiquette moderates the intrusiveness of blasting out 475 contact update requests, and moves it from any proximity with spam. Still, my fearless prediction is that this will prove to be a generational issue, with younger, social software oriented users (the "gullible hipster wannabes" of his other prediction) gracefully accepting the social capital exchange implicit in contact updates, while older, less e-engaged folks will never buy into this new social ethos.