You like music, not endless radio jabber. You want to expand your collection, not your hours spent at musical kiosks at Borders.

So you turn to those as near and dear to you as your music repertoire; one friend assures you you'll love this "amazing new artist."

But as it turns out, the friend who shares your sense of humor also has what you consider to be a pretty funny taste in music.

So here you are, walled in by your limited CD collection and feelings of annoyance and guilt aimed at this friend who was only trying to help.

So when someone named Diane Sammer, who says she's the chief executive officer of Portland's Emergent Music LLC, claims she knows how to bridge the gap between you and prospective new-favorite artists, you listen to what she has to say. Despite the fact she's twice your age and her library consists of the likes of Ricky Lee Jones, "the music I listened to when I was in college."

The answer, Sammer says, is Goombah.

Goombah, she insists, has piqued the interest of music lovers and tech types alike. She says the Maine Technology Institute just made a $400,000 investment in this thing called Goombah, which Merriam Webster defines as a close friend or associate - used especially among Italian-American men.

Hold it. Let's be clear, that's in a non-threatening way.

Sammer explains: Launched in November 2006, Emergent Music's Goombah, she says, is "a site that hooks you up with the people most like you musically."

She raves that Guardian Unlimited, an online publication based in Great Britain, has named Goombah one of the "100 most useful sites."

OK, you think, I'll give this a try.

What do you have to lose anyway? Certainly not another friendship.

So you put your trust in the baby boomer who promises to take your iPod off repeat.

You download Goombah.

The site, www.goombah.com, grants you a free membership, then uploads and analyzes your iTunes music list.

It connects you with users who also like the Beatles, enabling you to browse their collections to fill in your gaps.

It provides a highly individualized recommendation of tracks belonging to matching members.

Sammer says Goombah draws recommendations from the millions of unique tracks in other member collections.Ê

"I've bought several new CDs because of it," Sammer says. "People are the path to music and the best way to find new music is through others who share a similar passion."

As it turns out, lucky for most 20-somethings (Emergent's target audience), it seems there are millions of artists joining Ricky Lee Jones in the Goombah directory. For the more users there are, the more artists there are.

You click on a tab that reads "recommended tracks" and on the screen appears a list of personalized recommendations of songs drawn from the site's users, as promised by Sammer.

To download a song, simply double click on one of the recommended songs, and a box pops up offering links to Napster, Amazon and iTunes. Then sample a song and decide whether to purchase that individual song or album.

Goombah introduces a natural word-of-mouth network of users with similar music tastes, among them user name ConradA, who you're thrilled to see also recently added songs by artists including KT Tunstall and Pete Yorn.

A song by The Donovan Frankenreiter Band called "It Don't Matter" is also on ConradA's list.

You slide on your headphones to hear what you think is a new band, and realize you've heard this tune before, the first time, a few years ago, when The Frankenreiter Band opened for a Jack Johnson concert. The second time, a few weeks ago on the car radio.

Aha. You link Frankenreiter with "It Don't Matter."

Perfect.

Looks like your Herbie Hancock and Joshua Radin albums will be taken off repeat and laid to rest after all - at least for a few weeks.

You wonder about the enabler behind the green and pink note that is Goombah's icon. So you click another tab and read about the company's current chief technical officer Gary Robinson, of Brunswick, who also belongs to the baby boomer generation.

"He said he was thinking about doing this 20 years ago, and the technology finally caught up with him," Sammer adds.

In the mid-1980s Robinson founded Microvox Systems Inc., a voice mail-based dating service in New York City called 212-ROMANCE, the first commercial application to use collaborative filtering. He also developed leading anti-spam filters such as SpamAssassin (PC Magazine's Editor's Choice for spam filtering in 2003), SpamSieve (MacWorld's Software of the Year for 2003) and SpamBayes (PC World's Editor's Choice for spam filtering for 2005).

Those anti-spam technologies are similar to those utilized on Goombah.com, linking Internet and desktop applications. Emergent has patents pending on Goombah's distributed architecture, a design much more efficient and easily scaled than a server-based solution.

As you surf Goombah's site, you see the computer screen reads "Fri. 11:10 a.m.," and you click ahead. You notice a new box stating it's "free music Friday."

Now we're talking.

As it turns out, Goombah also offers promotional free music downloads, a perk to the site, secondary to music recommendations. Thousands of free music downloads from record labels are offered by Emergent to users - ranging from Definitive Jux, a hip-hop label, to Indie 911, which caters to, you guessed it, the independent artist - to promote themselves. Every Friday new artists are added to the growing list of freebies surpassing 1,000, which include Cursive, Ani DiFranco, Erin McKeown, Dinosaur Jr. and Vienna Tang.

Goombah also lets users send and receive messages to each other's profiles.

Fifteen minutes later, visible along the horizon are an expanse of musicians suited to you. Finally, your wall of frustration has been bulldozed and feelings of resentment left in the dust. You've even made a new e-friend named ConradA who may not get your sense of humor over the Internet, but surely takes his music collection as seriously as you do.