Radio programmers are now able to collect so much data about listener habits that some have begun fine-tuning their shows down to the second–to the dismay of on-air personalities like Ryan Seacrest.

The “American Idol” TV show host has a popular morning radio show based in Los Angeles that frequently takes the top spot in its target audience of listeners age 18-34. But that isn’t good enough. He has been complaining about being told to cut short the chatter and play more Lady Gaga and other hit artists, all because of the rollout of an audience-measurement system used for selling advertising.

Arbitron Inc.’s (ARB) Portable People Meter two years ago began replacing radio’s antiquated diary-based audience-measurement system, in which people kept written records of what they listened to.

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They did say it was too close to call.

Last night’s “American Idol” win by Kris Allen–despite some social-media analyses pointing to an Adam Lambert victory–highlights how close the two contestants were, and how changes in sentiment late Wednesday may have turned the tide.

Data-analytics firm Biz360 issued a statement Wednesday afternoon predicting that Mr. Lambert would be the winner. It, however, qualified that “an accurate statistical prediction is impossible due to the limitations of margins of error,” with a less than 1 percent difference between the two singers.

At the time, Mr. Allen was generating a slightly lower amount of coverage and positive commentary on blogs, Twitter, MySpace and other data sources, it said.

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The Internet has spoken: The “American Idol” race is too close to call.

The hit reality TV show holds its 2009 season finale on Wednesday night, when either Adam Lambert or Kris Allen will be crowned as winner.

Biz360, a company that measures blog and other social media chatter for companies, has been turning its technology into an “Idol” predictor in recent weeks. Measuring both the volume and tone of coverage, it accurately predicted that Matt Girard, Allison Iraheta and Danny Gokey would be voted off the show, in that order.

But while the Biz360 folks worked through the night trying to read the tech tea leaves, they say that it is just too close to call. As of Wednesday morning, Lambert had an edge over Allen of just 1 percent, they said.

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During the “Launch Pad” session, five start-ups took a grilling from developers, journalists and venture capitalists, then faced a crowd vote at the Web 2.0 Expo’s version of “American Idol.”

As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?”

None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.

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If you read this blog, you might think that Kara Swisher isn’t a big fan of fun. Or at least of silly, fun apps like SuperPoke! and what we call “social entertainment.” Call me silly, but I’d take entertainment over utility any time, and you know what? I bet you would too.

Case in point: the week of April 21 and the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary. That Tuesday marked a very important day for our country. A major competition between visible and opposing candidates was decided. It was a vote that is sure to generate publicity and campaigning over the coming months, and it will no doubt continue to occupy center stage of our national attention. Of course, I’m talking about “American Idol.”

That week, the two most popular television broadcasts were “American Idol” and “American Idol” (Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively). The third and fourth were both “Dancing with the Stars.” Check out the table below (from Nielsen Media Research; click on all tables and charts to make them bigger) and perhaps you’ll arrive at the same conclusion I did: When it comes to consumption, we prefer entertaining fare.

Likewise on the Web, Google News’s (GOOG) most popular searches in 2007 are by and large entertainment related (from Google Zeitgeist 2007):

Here’s a graph from Alexa.com of traffic to the three most popular non-search-engine Web sites and the most popular news Web site.

And here’s a graph from a Morgan Stanley (MS) “Internet Trends” report from 2008 of two of those same Web sites and the two most popular search-engines:

That last graph made a pretty big splash when it debuted at the Web 2.0 Expo conference; its title was “YouTube + Facebook Views > Yahoo! or Google…” Or to put it another way: today, fun is more powerful than utility.

Consider the value of other companies that deliver entertainment: Disney (DIS), Time Warner (TWX) and Sony (SNE) have a combined market cap of over $168 billion. Gross revenue for the NFL and MLB last year exceeded $12 billion. Apple (AAPL) made nearly $2 billion through iTunes music sales alone. Social networks benefit from increased activity, advertisers benefit from an exuberant audience, and widget users can, well, share favorite “American Idol” moments, send virtual margaritas or trout slap each other.

So seriously Kara, you have to try throwing a sheep or two. As Dr. Seuss said: “If you never have, you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”

Keith Rabois is vice president of strategy and business development at Slide, which makes widgets and applications such as SuperPoke!