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Couldn't sleep. Wrote some code to display live feed of celeb tweets (celebritiesthattwitter.com)
41 points by aaroneous on July 16, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments


It doesn't fit on my screen - you should make the tweets appear at the top and have the older ones move downwards.


I think you should include direct links to the original tweets. Humorous idea though.


Thanks for the feedback - if you hit that refresh button you should see your suggestion is live.

I made it open the tweet in a new window but if you guys think that's obnoxious just let me know.


I like the layout, clean, simple and colorful. One thing: new tweets should appear at the top and let it push the older ones down.


SOOOO.... obvious question. what other groups have you thought of doing this for and do you plan to do it soon? I could see it working for the tech blogosphere pretty well. politicians, too?

I love how the celebs talk to each other - and how you only show @replies within the group. would love to see this creating a space for conversations between prominent people in all walks of life. academics, big-company employees (google, yahoo, etc.) ...

you've got a great idea and great implementation here. i love also how you have made strong decisions and reduced the interactivity to the absolute minimum. no pause or rewind - only restart, click on a name, or click on a link a celeb has posted... this makes it like TV, but with hyperlinks in a completely non intrusive way. and the links should definitely stay popups.


Hey.. we are hackers, were are the technical details? Language, hosting, APIs, architecture...

PS: Thanks for sharing.


Cron'd Python script polls the Twitter API grabbing any new tweets and caches them to a file on a shared server.

Ajax periodically polls a PHP script that reads the cached tweets looking for ones that are new to that particular client, and if there isn't anything new it displays tweets from the history.

The page itself is really simple, mostly just some JS and Mootools.

Lemme know if I'm leaving anything out...


Wow this is disturbingly awesome. It's like reading People magazine. Turn the brain off and just stare.


Grammatically speaking, the name is incorrect. The site should be called CelebritiesWhoTwitter...the correct domain name is still available (and one character shorter!)

Sorry, I can't help myself. Cool site.


Very nice slide effect, but the size of the text does kind of slap you in the face a bit.

Is it your script or does Joel Madden tweet A LOT? And primarily about Subway?


I think the dude just loves subway, what can I say?

I'll let you in on a secret I learned while building this app: most celebs are hella weird.


Add a link to their Wikipedia (or something). I know who Obama and Slash are, but not too sure about some of the other "celebrities".


Who are these people? I've heard of the Terminator and Craig Newmark, but none of the other twitters you display.

Maybe you could have a-list.celebritiesthattwitter.com, b-list.celebritiesthattwitter.com, and what you've got now which is not-reallly.celebritiesthattwitter.com


I find this hauntingly amusing.


I have to say, I really like the design, and if you seriously wrote this in one night, I'm going to jump off a bridge, I couldn't design a site that looked that nice and actually worked in a month...


can you remove spencer pratt? I refuse to recognize him as a celebrity...


I'm with you on this one. Consider him removed and celebrityless.


Nice, where is your list of celebs coming from?

By the way, the tweets don't scroll up correctly in chrome, and I think it'd make more sense if new tweets showed up on top and the list moved down.


Is this any different than creating a Twitter account for the sole purpose of following celebrities?


yes.



Made it clear to me that at least half of all celeb tweets are spewed from PR bots.


Live? I refresh and the same tweets play back again, never anything new.


Isn't it Kirstie Alley, not Kristie? Is that the right person?


Fixed. Thanks!


What is QmvcFramework ?


Funny story... this site was originally supposed to be a demo for the framework but then the demo was finished before the framework. =X


this is brilliant. best twitter site ever.




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