In a rather interesting about turn, American Idol has aggregated all of the social networking profiles of its contestants into one single ‘AI9Contestants’ username – which has been rolled out onto Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

The US show embraced its online fans towards the beginning on the season, pushing out individual profiles for each of its 24 finalists. The only explanation for the switch has been a message posted in some iteration on all of the networks in question. The tweet for instance read; “Thanks so much for following me! All my updates from now on will be on our Official Ai9 Twitter Page, please follow me there @AI9Contestants.”

As reported by Mashable, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today are both speculating that the presence of separate profiles allowed early favourites to be highlighted, making the playing ground unfair for those with less fans or followers. This would also fuel media headlines, and add some transparency to the otherwise secretive voting process.

In some ways, Idol is right. Popular profiles or people often benefit from the snowball effect and there’s a risk that people would back those that appear to be most popular, instead of those they really like. This, combined with the ‘who is my friend following?’ aspect could seriously sway the public vote.

It’s a shame that an evolution of the programme – which may have even enhanced its success – has been stopped so suddenly in its tracks. All things must change (as shown by Simon Fuller’s move to become executive producer at CKX Inc, the company that owns his own 19 Entertainment), and it’s not always a bad thing.

We’re sitting on the fence on this one, as there’s both a positive and a negative outcome for these actions. Time will tell.