Are you using Pandora yet? Are you? Because if you aren’t, stop what you’re doing and head over there right now.

The concept sounds familiar at first. You set up your free account, you plug in the names of a few of your favorite bands, and it puts together a personal radio station for you. Same old crap, right? Wrong! Thanks to the amazing pseudoscience of the “Music Genome Project,” it identifies the traits of the songs and artists you like, and automatically cues up other songs that share those traits. And not just songs you already know! Little obscure bands, and long-forgotten filler tracks by bands you thought you knew.

And if Pandora makes a bad call? Gives you 50 Cent when you asked for Public Enemy? You can say, “I don’t like this,” and the service will acknowledge the screw-up and refine the selection in the future. As I understand it, it’s comparable to training your TiVo, but what do I know? I can’t afford a TiVo.

Observe: An hour into my first session, it hit me: I had only specified bands with male vocalists, and that was all it had been playing. So I entered in a couple groups with women on vocals, and it combined that information with that data it already had. Twenty minutes later? Bikini Kill. I didn’t even ask for Bikini Kill. It didn’t even cross my mind. But damned if I wasn’t happy to hear it!

I swear, I don’t normally get this excited about the wild world of products and services, but that was before this little miracle-machine came into my life. Really, try to trick it! Give it country, rap, punk, and Tom Waits. You know what you’ll get back? Daniel Johnston. Thank you, robot servant!

Oh, you have no idea how badly I want this to be it. To be the thing that people use as their primary online identity. Met someone nice? Hitting it off? Why scare them away with your poorly-designed myspace profile? Now, you can direct them to your cooler digital surrogate who knows more about music than you, and who lets you take credit for its good taste.

It’s not perfect yet; there’s no standalone player, so you have to listen to it on the website, and every so often you suspect that the selection isn’t as vast as you’d hoped– especially when you hear the same obscure song for the third time in one night. But this stuff can be fixed with a little work on the part of the developers; an upload here, a keyword there, and your favorite band is in on the action.

Limited or not, Pandora has potential to be something great. As long as they don’t let users post photos and blogs, we’re cool.