There are personal messages on Google+, but not everyone knows about it.

I have already heard and read more than once, including from quite serious personalities (for example, Pavel Durov) that there are no personal messages on Google+ and this, they say, is its minus, waiting for the earliest correction. There is sending an email from the profile page, but many hide it, and in Google Talk you cannot invite a person if you do not know his address, even if he is added to a circle. Well, do not call him? Not at all. Here is the official information on Google+ where the functionality of personal messages is officially announced: see the paragraph “How to send a private message” (how to send a personal message).

Technically, a personal message is different from the usual only in that it is not published “for all” and not for circles, but for one or several selected users. The names of these users need to be entered in the recipients line, while making sure that there are no other recipients standing there. Otherwise, everything is identical to the usual messages. Perhaps, Google simply decided not to screw up a separate system when all the necessary functionality is in the existing one.
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Judge for yourself: when receiving a personal message, the addressee will receive a notification by mail - if they are not disabled. Even if disabled, he will see the alert in the red window in the upper right corner. Chat is updated in real time, so there is no need to overload the page. You can communicate with any number of interlocutors. You can use formatting, different types of underscore, which is not in all IM-systems. What else is missing?

Perhaps, out of the minuses we can distinguish the unusual nature of this kind of “chat”: when the addressee sees a personal message in the general tape, he may not understand that it is addressed to him personally, and react differently than required. But all new at first is unusual. Over time, users will probably get used to the new system and will take it for granted.

But there are quite interesting advantages. For example, each “chat” has a permanent address (permalink), so you can always resume a conversation that ended a year ago. You can even create bookmarks for conversations with different people. You can embed any links, images, videos into the start message that starts the chat. For example, you can show a few photos and start their discussion. The private messaging system is built into the general content sharing functionality using its tools. It speaks only about the power of these tools.

Developers can be blamed (but I would not) for the non-standard implementation of personal messages, but not that they simply do not exist.