CRM Profile to include "Contact" and/or "Private Msg" Functionality

Part of the joy of community is being able to reach out and contact somebody in it. This also enables for movements, projects, networking, and other such powerful dynamics that I want my users to be able to effect.

Drupal has Contact and Private Msg. modules that work well for this, but they aren't part of the CRM profile. When members search each other out, they are able to drop a line without the other person having to reveal their email in their profile.

Early thoughts on this would include a simple setting that would allow civiCRM administrator to determine whether the "selector" search results link to the Drupal profile or the civiCRM profile. This would obviate the need for lots of new coding and just create an either/or structure that is up to site admin.

Can anyone see a weakness in this approach? From what I can tell, the Drupal profile "knows" about everything in the CRM profile that is set to be puublically visible, but not vice versa. Why not just link to the Drupal profile for the purposes of user's publicly visible attributes?

All this enthusiasm is backed with no money and little knowledge of the coding structure of civiCRM. I am a newbie PHP hack, and I am just setting out to build a non-profit for an open source curriculum writing site for K-12 educators. Can someone point me to the code that would contain the profile link out of the "selector" search results...perhaps I can tweak the code.

Cheers,

Andrew