Updated: Twitter...Help!

05/10 Update: Twittelator Pro iPhone/iPod Touch App "Subgroups" lets me add people and shows all their posts for days! This solves my problem completely. Thank you Twittelator! (Plus Twittelator Pro has "Add to Read it Later" as an option, which I find to be far preferable to Instapaper.)

05/09 Blog:
I'm doing something a little different with this short blog...I'm asking for help!

I have become addicted to Twitter in the past month or so since I joined it. I follow a gazillion people, and there's no way I will read even half their updates, and that's ok. I'll read some now and then. There are a number of people's updates that I want to make sure I don't miss though, and so far, I've only found a couple of ways to do that:

1. Get sms alerts on my mobile device (Get a text message everytime they "tweet"). This would be neat, except for the fact that I don't need to wake up to 200 new text messages...
2. Have a list of those people, and manually check their messages on Twitter...which takes roughly the same amount of time as a meeting of MLB with Congress trying to find all the names of players who used steroids in the past.

I use Tweetdeck, and thought that would fix my problem, by creating a column for those favorites...but that is only valuable when my computer is on & Tweetdeck is running. For reasons I can't understand, when I sign on to Tweetdeck (or Tweetstack on the iPod), it only goes about 2 hours back in time. This doesn't work for me. I have odd sleeping hours (as anyone who follows me on Twitter or is my friend in Facebook already knows). So I will, in theory, miss half the messages from people I want to really follow.

So here's my question: Is anyone aware of a Twitter app for the iPod touch, or something for the computer, that would let me to track my 50 to 100 or so "favorite" tweeters, allowing me to easily access their tweets without being signed on near the time that they send them (either by saving their tweets, or just saving their names in one spot)? Or do I need to stick with the text messages or manual checks?

Thanks for helping a Twitter addict in need...I need this solved so I can give back valuable time to Facebook, where I interact with people that I actually know in real life, which is understandably more important!