How to Post a Message to One Person in Google+
One of the first things you will notice on Google+ is that you can’t post on someone’s stream like you can post to someone’s wall on Facebook. If all you’ve ever used is Facebook and MySpace, you’re sure to be confused.
But if you’ve used Twitter or Plurk, you might have already figured out on your own how to send a message to one person only in Google+. Actually, the way to do this is exactly like Plurk and only vaguely similar to Twitter.
Here’s part of a comment I posted on “Opinions: Google+”, which is a decent article about Google+:
In your own stream, under the post box where you can choose the Circles you want to post to, you can also just type in one person’s name and that post will show up in only that person’s stream (and yours, of course). This is also how it works in Plurk when I want to post a message to one person.
I rather like this better than having to post on someone’s wall like in Facebook – there are some issues with that, like people trolling what you posted to your friend.
I know it’s not what everyone is accustomed to, but once you get used to this way of sending a message to someone, it’s much better and way more sane. Sanity at last!
I guess I should mention that you should delete any Circles selected and make sure only the one name of the person you want to send to is listed under the post box. (It seems not everyone is paying attention to the tiny little details as I may be sometimes.)
If people are still struggling with the idea of posting a message to only one person, the best I can say is think of the very first method of communicating online – email. When you want to send an email to someone you don’t go to their email box and drop the message, you write in your email account and click ‘send’. Somehow because of MySpace and Facebook, people have gotten used to thinking in the reverse. Just think of sending a post to someone, instead of writing on their ‘wall’. The end result is the same, communication between only the two of you.
~~~C
Thank you so much! I was searching forever trying to figure out how to do this! I figured there was no way Google would leave a feature like that completely out!
[Reply]
Comment by Keri — 2011/07/12 @ 00:39
Thank You! I was starting to think I was going to have to make a new circle every time I wanted to post to just one person.
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Comment by Mas Sohl — 2011/07/25 @ 14:57
Hey.
Thanks for explaining that. It is what I thought. However, I just wish there was a simple way to do this from someone’s profile. So, I go through my contacts, see John Doe’s profile. Click it, then realise I want to say something to him. It would be so convenient if there was a button “Mention in Post” that links you back to a POST screen, where you can type your message as you explained..
As far as I can tell, in order to do this from John’s profile. You have to click back to your home screen. Compose post, and then try remember John’s username or whatever. And if you have many contacts named John, it gets pretty annoying.
[Reply]
fey Morgaina Reply:
March 12th, 2013 at 19:07
“It would be so convenient if there was a button “Mention in Post” that links you back to a POST screen,”
The ability to “send message” (aka “Mention in Post”) to someone directly from that person’s profile is available in Google+. However, each Google+ user can simply turn it off via profile settings if the user doesn’t want random people sending messages. (This setting is highly customizable. You can even set it so that only one person is able to send a message to you.) If it is there, clicking “send message” brings up a box to type out a message/post.
The other way around this is to simply use the share box at the top right of the page when you’re on someone else’s profile. When you think about it, having the share box there all the time makes having the “send message” button a little redundant, the only difference is that the “send message” button fills in the name for you.
There is also a “send email” button, which is just as highly customizable as the “send message” button.
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Comment by Kris Adams — 2013/01/31 @ 05:04
Very nice site!
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Comment by Pharmg570 — 2014/12/31 @ 13:01
Hello!
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Comment by online — 2016/06/14 @ 06:10
Hello!
[Reply]
Comment by for — 2016/08/02 @ 03:52