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