Tonight's American Idol finale comes down to two final contestants after whittling away all the American Idol wannabes and pretenders. America will be texting their votes or dialing to show they have the "McPheever" for Katharine or that they're members of Taylor Hick's "Soul Patrol". Personally, I think the best two voices already left - Mandisa and Chris Daughtry. While one could argue that Mandisa's weight precluded her from winning it all, she certainly had the best vocal range of any contestant. Chris Daughtry on the other hand had the looks, charisma, rocker persona and the voice to match. He looked unbeatable, and that was part of the problem. Many people didn't vote for him because he seemed a "lock" for the finals. I'm still bitter about Chris getting voted off, but I have no one to blame but myself since I didn't vote.

It got me thinking though - how does Cingular process all those millions of votes in just 2 hours? This year has been the highest volume for American Idol text voting yet, and conspiracy rumors aside, the voting process has gone on with out a hitch. Actually, from everything I've heard it's only when you dial-in your vote that there have been cries of conspiracy. But seriously, how do millions of SMS messages in the span of just 2 hours get delivered on time?

Well, that's the beauty of the Internet. SMS messages are pretty small in size and therefore don't take up much bandwidth to get delivered.

Side note: Did you know there is a software application designed for your PC's modem that will dial your favorite American Idol automatically to vote for him or her? Yup, called DialIdol, it will even detect busy signals and redial. So while other voters are frantically hitting that redial button you can relax, and watch Hannity and Colmes or something else good on TV while your PC does the voting for you. By the way, DialIdol accurately predicted Chris would get the boot based on user reports submitted back to the website.

here's a screenshot of the software:


History Lesson On SMS
LogicaCMG created the first text message more than a decade ago, and today delivers two out of every three text messages sent in the world. LogicaCMG also provides one out of every four multimedia messaging systems worldwide. LogicaCMG’s Next Generation messaging and payments solutions are deployed by 300 of the world's top network operators, serving more than 800 million active users. The company has over 40 years of experience in the IT industry, employs 30,000 staff and has offices across 36 countries and over $3B (UK) in revenues.

Now that we know LogicCMG probably handles 2 out of 3 SMS American Idol votes, conspiracy theorists will claim that Rupert Murdock (owner of FOX and other properties) owns a stake in LogicCMG and can therefore skew the voting results at will. That's hogwash. I can confirm however that the NSA has installed wiretaps at LogicCMG to track all American SMS messages.

Just kidding...