The future of Pandora

I got the chance to meet with Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, last week so i would like to seize the opportunity of this post on Techcrunch to make a couple remarks about Pandora, pandorafm and their future.
Pandora is a great music recommendation tool, which striking characteristic is to mostly propose to the user music she has rarely heard before. This is helped by the fact that 80% of Pandora's library is independant music.

Now to our point: pandorafm, the mashup by Gabe Kangas that sends the music listening information of a user from Pandora to last.fm has been received with open arms by Pandora while everybody was wondering what their reaction would be. But after talking with Tim it becomes obvious that it makes sense.
A lot of users are torn between the two products, one providing original recommendations while the other one has great community tools. Pandora, as of today, has very few features related to communities. In fact it is one of the main weaknesses of the product. Consequently, a new tool allowing them to get closer to music communities is a great asset on the short term.
However Pandora plans to introduce more community-centric services in the future to be more competitive in the field. What will happen to pandorafm then, when it will actually become a competitive product to Pandora's services? We can imagine that the roll-out of such services and the publishing of the APIs will take time and will make the transition easier.
But it will be interesting to see what happens eventually to pandorafm once Pandora becomes stronger on the community side.

Tags: pandora last.fm pandorafm music web2.0 mashup