Missing In Canada is a weekly feature where I will profile gadgets from other countries, consumer items that aren’t available here and (except for rare import shoppes) probably never will be.

Pandora is the best online service for discovering new music and listening to it for free. It remains one of the most addictive websites, a top application for Facebook, and one of the best free applications for Windows Mobile smartphones and Apple’s iPhone. You simply type in the name of a favorite artist and select a song. Pandora then uses an analysis of that song’s characteristics to create a playlist of similar songs listed within the site’s database. The results are extremely effective and powered by The Music Genome Project, which has spent eight years analyzing songs based on 400 different characteristics.

As you listen to your generated music station, you can further tweak the results by giving each song as it plays a “thumbs down” to indicate that you would like it stricken from the list or a “thumbs up” to have Pandora include its characteristics in finding more music for your playlist.

With a registered profile, you can then save the playlist as your own personal radio station and even share it with others. The site also maintains a large directory of biographies and musical profiles where you can find more information on the artists you discover and add comments for others to read.

Pandora is free with displayed ads, but also offers the option of paying for a subscription to use the service ad-free.

Pandora was available in Canada up until 2006 when the music industry imposed licensing restrictions on the service, limiting its service to users inside in the United States. Since then it has launched an application for Facebook that allows you to listen to and manage your Pandora account through your Facebook profile. A free application for Windows Mobile handsets allows you to use the Pandora service, listening to and creating new radio stations through your cellphone.

When the Pandora App for the iPhone first launched, it quickly became the most popular on the iTunes Store and today remains the top App in the music category.

At this year’s MacWorld Expo Pandora released Pandora 2.0 for the iPhone, an updated version of their popular App that, in addition to listening to music stations saved on your profile, the App now displays song selections by album art using CoverFlow in landscape view and now sports a progress bar during playback. Tapping the album artwork will access the artist’s bio and open an option to e-mail your station to a friend. You can quickly play song samples from all of your bookmarks on your Pandora profile and can use your iPhone to create new music stations based on genre.

Pandora is currently allowed to operate in the United States thanks to that country’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act. According to Pandora, until Canada introduces a similar piece of legislation, it will remain restricted from Canadian users.

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