Pandora.com puts a smile on your face for nothing

I have been a big fan of Pandora since the start of this year. Pandora is a music recommendation service that is tuned towards discovering music based on its inherent qualities. The music is streamed via a Flash application.



I had stopped listening to my 'station' midway through this year as the streaming quality was not ideal. I had assumed that this was in relation to the poor bandwidth via Streamyx in Kuala Lumpur. However, as of late the playback and quality of the user experience has been superb. I've had Pandora running for hours non-stop, playing the music that I like. Check out my profile page here: http://www.pandora.com/people/nprajan

While the service remains true to itself, I would be delighted if any of the following enhancements were to be introduced:

• Make it easier to share my station: allow me to publish it on my blog. The only way for me to share my station now is to email it to a friend, or rip the Javascript link and function from my profile page.
• Widget/RSS of the songs I am listening to now: this would be a nice to have as opposed to just the list of songs I have bookmarked. Fact is, if I'm listening to music on my station, it's highly likely that it's music I already enjoy. I make it a point to *train* my station by indicating the music I don't like, but find it to be cumbersome to have to *bookmark* songs I like, just for it to appear on the current widget.
• An option to disable the idle timer: I've had Pandora running for hours, and at times when my computer is unattended. Somehow, the Flash app detects this as me being idle, and stops the music. I have to acknowledge a message prompt before the music resumes. While I understand that the concept of Pandora requires user interaction to train the station, I've come to realise that after being on the service for a while and training it regularly, it's been able to dish out music I like, almost all the time. TIP: the workaround for now is to place your mouse cursor on the Flash app is you plan to leave it running idle
  

Side notes:

• I love the way Pandora dishes out ads on their dedicated Flash player page. It is automatically refreshed to serve standard IAB sizes in addition to some cool skins, which I would assume will cost more to sponsor. The screenshot above shows a Hyundai sponsored ad which is one of the more elborate ads I've seen thus far
• Pandora is looking to Level 3 for networking and bandwidth solutions -- read the press release
  
• Pandora's Flash app was built using OpenLaszlo -- read it here
  
• A review of Pandora & Last.fm by Steve Kraus -- read the review