I have an idea for a way to implement a server side contact list management system. It seems that since Skype is p2p it would be a problem to have server side contact lists, but what if you let the user pick their own server. you could have a option in the preferences that says "store my contacts remotely" then you could allow the user to enter in an ftp:// and a user name and pass for that ftp. Then Skype could just upload all the contacts that are made to that ftp and keep all the contacts up to date. Then when Skype starts it can download that file and check if there are any new contacts that need to be added to the contact list. And while you're already uploading contacts you might as well have a "store my preferences remotely" option and upload all the other preferences as well, so when we log in on different machines we can always have Skype the way we like it.
Thanks for reading
-Jake

I don't think FTP would be the appropriate protocol... I would accept SFTP, SSH, HTTPS, but nothing non-encrypted.
The problem that stays is extra support skype needs to bring for supporting those protocols! Why not download your profile yourself BEFORE starting skype, and upload it yourself if you think you made important changes AFTER you finished your skype session?

You could even write a wrapper script that would do the work for you!
Here a simple example suitable for Linux and probably also Mac:

Hmm yeah i see what you are saying about ftp not being the best protocol. I guess more important than the protocol is how it's implemented. I agree it wouldn't be to hard to make a script do this for you but I really think that's more of a work around than a solution. Maybe someday skype will allow plugins then you could make a script that does something like that and have it nicely integrated into the program