Plaxo, an online contact management service, has released a beta version of its plugin for Address Book.

The Plaxo service allows you to synchronise contact information, to update the information of contacts who are also Plaxo members automatically and to ask for updated contact information from others.

The idea is to keep ahead of the endless changes in phone numbers and email addresses that cause you gradually to lose contact with people.

With the plugin much of the work of keeping your contact information current is made automatic. Its preferences allow you to “set and forget” the synchronisation and update options. It also adds a collapsable pane to each Address Book contact that enables you to manually request an update on contact information and displays a history of your communication with that person (this feature is “coming soon”).

Last year Plaxo struck a deal with AOL to manage the contact information for AOL’s Triton Instant Messaging application. Unlike some other apps, Plaxo has also opened up its API to third-party developers.

Services like this are not for everyone. It’s not for me. Despite Plaxo’s strong privacy policy, I’m not happy loading up my contact information into some third-party’s database.

Oddly, I do almost the same thing hourly with iSync and don’t think twice about it. Somehow I trust Apple more. I’m such a babe-in-the-woods.

But if you are interested in testing out a service like this (you can delete your Plaxo account and all your information entirely if you change your mind), download the beta of Plaxo’s Address Book plugin and give it a try.