There are a slew of social relationship managers that have been released in the past year and the space is really heating up.

There’s Gist, here’s CEO T.A. McCann talking about it in front of the Google IO conference.

But there’s Xobni, Rapportive, eTacts, and others.

I’m trying them all.

So far Gist is my favorite. Why? Because of its completeness of information about other people it brings into my view and because of its web centricity. Xobni is nice if you use Outlook, for instance, but I don’t use that anymore.

Rapportive is nice because it works on regular old Gmail. Gist just shipped support for Gmail, but only if you are using Google Apps. I don’t use that either.

But which one is your favorite? Have you considered using a relationship manager? They aren’t for everyone, but if you need to keep up to date on a large number of people, which usually means executives, PR people, or salespeople, then these things are really great. It’s interesting that everyday Gist sends me an email and presents information about the people I’m emailing with the most. That often lets me learn about people in a new way that I miss on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

For instance, you can see my public profile on Gist and get an idea of the kinds of things it presents about the people in your life. Now, imagine you were headed to a meeting with a VC, or trying to sell something. Wouldn’t having all this data about that person be useful? Also, Gist has a nice iPhone app that shows you info and it just got an update today that lets you import your iPhone’s contacts.

By the way, I’ve created a Twitter list of “weapons for entrepreneurs” like these and other tools, people, and services that help entrepreneurs do their jobs better. Why aren’t you following that?

Now that more and more people are getting iPads we are seeing just how they change everything, especially art and music. Here I meet David Newman, artist, in a parking garage. I was sitting next to him in the Google IO keynotes and was amazed at how fast he worked to draw really great portraits of people. Now he couldn’t have done this demo on the go with a laptop. You can see his art on Flickr.

A few weeks ago I met Rana Sobhany who had gotten tons of compliments at the first iPad Dev Camp with her iPad DJ’ing system. So, she gave me a look at what she’s doing. That video went viral and has been watched half a million times. Wild. But she’s not the only one using iPads. I met Wil.i.iam who is the music genius behind the Black Eyed Peas. We talk mostly about Twitter, but at the end he pulls out his iPad too. Rana only had the iPads a week when we shot this video, I’ll follow up with her later in the summer to see how she’s progressed.

One of my kids’ favorite apps is the Smule Magic Piano, and here Lang Lang, famous pianist, walked out on stage and played flight of the bumblebee on it.

There’s even more video about iPad music apps up on YouTube. Same thing for iPad art, where you’ll see an art exhibit on an iPad and more.

One of the most interesting conversations I’ve had about the open social web lately is with Laurent Eschenauer, arcitect on OneSocialWeb.

We have a long conversation about why you want to help build a federated open social network.

Is he your savior?

Based on conversations people are having over on Google Buzz about this video, yes.