Widget Watch: Pandora, your personal Dashboard DJ

Pandora is a really interesting streaming music web service that helps you discover new artists based on the qualities of the music you like, such as the beat, artist's influences, genre, and much more. It's a pretty exciting experiment based on the Music Genome Project, and Download Squad wrote up a more in-depth overview last year while Pandora was still in private beta, though the service has since gone public for everyone to enjoy.

Which brings us to the Pandora widget, which brings the goodness of this slick experiment to Mac OS X's Dashboard. However, after briefly tinkering with this, those who are very discriminating about their system resource should beware: this is one of the most resource-intensive widgets I've come across, hogging about 44MB of real memory and about 450 of my Virtual Memory on a 1.83 Ghz MacBook with 1GB RAM. By comparison, even a fairly active widget like iStat pro only gobbles up about 5.5MB/340MB, respectively. Still, if cycles are of no worry to you, this widget seems to work just as well as its browser-based counterpart, so Mac-slinging Pandora fans now have another option to get their experimental music listening fix.