Here are two great tastes that taste horrible together:

• GroupTweet: GroupTweet offers “Group Tweeting”. If a member sends a direct message to a GroupTweet Twitter account, it is rebroadcast from the Twitter account so that everyone following it can see it. It’s a great way to instantly opt in to communication with a large set of people without having to follow each individually.
• Auto-Follow: If you’re like me, you get dozens of follows a day, sometimes. I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt and will auto-follow them back with services like SocialToo and Twollow. If their tweets are annoying or self-serving, I simply unfollow. I find it’s easier to unfollow the one bad apple than to manually vet and follow all the good folks who follow me.

Unfortunately, when combined with a third feature, auto-direct message on follow, these two features can be a train wreck. With auto-direct message on follow, one receives a direct message from someone when one follows them. Here’s what happens when these three features are combined:

• @PersonA follows @GroupTweet
• @GroupTweet auto-follows @PersonA back (or manually, for that matter)
• @PersonA’s auto-dm goes to @GroupTweet and then is shared with all @GroupTweet followers:

Thanks for following me! Be sure to check out my awesome podcast and purchase my hot line of fashion forward t-shirts at http://l0z3r.com/!

What’s so annoying about this is that @PersonA is thanking me for following them, when what started the whole thing was they followed me. And now the whole GroupTweet is polluted with their sales pitch.

The solution
SocialToo offers a simple service that will opt you out of auto-generated direct messages. Just sign up at http://www.socialtoo.com/ and check the box that says “Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other services?”

Ah, peace and quiet.