Why would Google+ send posts as 'messages' to people outside of your circles?

[BrianCrouch]

A day ago I uploaded a photo of a US Navy ship mooring at Bell Harbor marina, which is across from my office (near the conference center site of SMX Advanced Seattle). A rude comment was posted by someone from Germany accusing me of sending this to them personally, offended because he's anti-military:  "Don't spam people pal." I blocked him.

So, since it was uploaded to my public stream and shared to my circles, I have no explanation as to how this could happen. If someone in my circles shared it to him, I suppose it could look like I sent it to him, but I haven't seen that happen before. Anyone else see behavior like this?

UPDATE: because this person was within one of the circles to whom I shared this photo, he received a notification that I'd shared it "directly" with him. See comment below.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Brian,

The popup where you choose who to share with when posting on Google+ has an option that says something like "email this post to X people not using Google+" ..it is usually checked by default on mine. Maybe this has something to do with it?

Sha

[BrianCrouch]

As I hadn't had a response I neglected to add this update.

Within Google+, if you share to specific circles, anyone that you've added to that circle will receive the message "John Doe shared this directly with you."

I had shared the aforementioned waterfront photo to my "inbound marketers" circle, as almost all of them are were SMX Advanced attendees, and thus knew the adjacent Bell Harbor Marina by the conference center. The individual who whined that I was "spamming" him received a + notification that I shared this photo "directly" with him, although in reality it was to my circle.

It wasn't clear what had happened at first because I am not in his circles, though I had added him to the inbound marketers circle (he's definitely out now).

If you've set your settings up so that you'll receive no notifications from people you haven't added to circles, you won't see messages like this. It's interesting to note that if you send messages to people you've added to circles, they will see the message that it was shared directly with them. **I think this is a bad user experience in Google+, as it creates the impression that a message actually sent to a group/circle, was sent individually. **

The attached image shows a person who sent a message to her Social Media circle (of about 300 people), but looking at the verbiage "Shared a post directly with you," one might think it was a direct individual ping.

rwlbD.jpg

[KeriMorgret]

Thanks for adding this information! I had wondered why people I hardly knew were sharing something "directly" with me.