Watching American Idol is enjoyable, but for me, predicting the eventual winner is more fun.

Reality Rate and Predict has a new feature: predict when each contestant will get eliminated.  Found on the home page, there are 5 choices: Top 24, Top 12, Top 5, Runner-Up, and Winner.  Top 24 means you think the contestant will get eliminated in the semifinal round, Top 12 means you think they’ll get eliminated between 6th and 12th place, and so on (I hope it’s pretty self-explanatory?).

Tell your friends about it.  It’s more fun when you can compare predictions against one another, so you can have that gratifying “I told you so” moment.

You know what the judges thought of the performances.  What did you think?  Rate Tuesday’s American Idol performances from the 12 girls in the top 24.  Aggregate ratings will update every 5 minutes, so your votes won’t immediately get counted.

Loved Siobhan.  Crystal’s great, but can’t see her winning… American Idol really doesn’t fit her talents.

In a bid to keep up with Internet geek trends, the Top 24 American Idol contestants have all been given official Twitter accounts and Facebook pages.  On this site’s contestant pages, you’ll see their latest tweets, with links to their Twitter and Facebook pages.

In theory, this should bring the contestants closer to their voting fans, allowing us to form stronger bonds with them and their journey.  In practice, it’s almost worthless.

Look at the timestamps for each contestant’s tweets: they’re all within 20 minutes of one another.  I’m speculating, but it feels like there’s a social media consultant telling the contestants to tweet at a specified time.  Chances are, they’re being edited before being published.  And that type of editing blunts Twitter’s magic: it’s powerful BECAUSE it’s unedited.

Hopefully they’ll loosen the reigns as time goes on, so we can really get to know the contestants on a personal level.

Spending more time on screen doesn’t necessarily lead to more popularity, but spending very little time on screen does seem to translate to less popularity.

By counting the number of Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers that each contestant has amassed on their official American Idol-based accounts, we can roughly measure each contestant’s initial popularity.  Below is a quick-and-dirty graph, ordered from fewest minutes on screen (Paige Miles & Joe Munoz) to the most (Michael Lynche).

The 3 Idols with the least amount of screen time (Paige, Joe, and Michelle Delamor) also have the fewest number of fans & followers.  But for the remaining 21 contestants, there doesn’t seem to be much correlation between screen time and popularity.

John Park, the 4th least-viewed contestant, has the most Facebook Fans and the 2nd most total followers.  Meanwhile, Michael Lynche, the most viewed Idol, ranks as the 18th most popular of 24.

This is all pretty intuitive: it’s hard to be a fan of someone you haven’t seen, but once you’ve seen someone, you can decide whether you like him or her.  It doesn’t necessarily help if you’re shown more, but it definitely hurts if you’re not shown enough.

Of course, this simple analysis might not be indicative of future voting.  The data represents only about 60,000 fans, a tiny slice of the 30 million weekly viewers.  Also, this will be biased toward the Internet geeks (like me), which might not necessarily be representative of the entire American Idol voting population.

So if you happen to like Paige, Joe, or Michelle this week, and want to see them perform again, you should probably vote for them, because they’ll need the help more than the others.

While analyzing the screen times for our Top 24 contestants, I noticed there were a chunk of contestants that we met during the initial auditions, but never heard from again.  Most were forgettable, but there were a couple that received a lot of initial screen time, and I personally wonder how they performed during Hollywood Week, or if they attended at all!

Here are a few contestants from the first 8 audition episodes who were never explicitly mentioned in the 4 Hollywood Week episodes.

• Chris Golightly – Definitely the most controversial of the non-mentions, Chris had reportedly made the Top 24 before being disqualified, and replaced by Tim Urban.  Rewind the final moments of the final Hollywood Week episode, and you’ll see Chris off to the right side of the screen, among the Top 24 finalists.  You can read more about this on other Idol blogs, like Joe’s Place.
• Mike Davis – Boston contestant who worked as an “actor” on the Codzilla speedboat.  Singing The Beatles’ Yesterday, he was described as a confident young man.  I didn’t think he was very good.
• Holly Harden – The Atlanta contestant who dressed up as a guitar.  For such a big personality, I would have thought she would be shown again.
• Jim Ranger – The worship pastor from the Los Angeles audition.  There were questions about whether he could handle his commitments to family and church.  However, I believe he was shown bobbing his head during Andrew Garcia’s “Straight Up” performance.  He ended up being cut at the same time as our favorite country girl, Vanessa Wolfe.
• Joshua Blaylock - The contestant who lacked confidence, whom Simon said had a good voice for a 13-year-old, who also told Simon to shut up (please).  They never called him out, but he got eliminated on Day 1, in the same line as beatboxer Jay Stone and former Barney kid Erica Rhodes.
• Danelle Hayes - The karaoke host with a 3-year old son.  She broke down during the audition.  I thought she had a great voice, and could flourish in the competition, but unfortunately, it seems she had some legal trouble that the producers did not want to deal with.

I have been estimating the amount of screen time each contestant has received, with the results posted here.

Through last week’s Hollywood episodes, there have been some contestants that have been shown much more than others.  Let’s take 2 of our recently-named Top 24: Michael Lynche and Lee DeWyze.  One has been on screen for nearly 7 1/2 minutes (Big Mike), and the other has been shown for 30 seconds.

While I do believe voters will ulitmately choose the more talented Idols over the more familiar ones, familiarity is still important, especially when the talent gap between contestants is narrow.

Note that Kris Allen, Season 8’s Idol winner, was shown in the Audition and Hollywood episodes for a mere 1 minute and 50 seconds, showing that his lack of air time didn’t hinder his talent and future success.  However, take last year’s semi-finalist Ricky Braddy, who arguably had just as much talent and as much air time, but couldn’t even make the finals.

Do you think air times matter?  I’d love to know your thoughts.

We’ve added embedded YouTube videos within the contestant home page and episode ratings pages.  Hopefully this will help you catch up with contestants you’ve forgotten about.