You may have come across this article from Justin Bee, which explains how to update Facebook directly from Google+ without the need for any browser extensions. Justin's approach uses email to send a message from Google+ to Facebook. Justin's article mentions that there may be similar ways to update Twitter, but they would rely on third party services that the author wasn't too sure about. Justin also mentions a significant downside to his method -it relies on the message being in the subject of the email, which Google+ truncates after 50 characters.
So I've taken a slightly different approach - although mine does rely on third party services, and actually doesn't result in a real-time update, but at least has a longer character limit. It also has the advantage of not needing to do anything extra in Google+ - all of your public posts are turned into tweets automagically.
It works in two steps. First, grab an Atom feed of your Google+ public posts; and second, publish that feed to Twitter. Here's the method, step-by-step:
- In Google+, go to your profile.
- The URL will be https://plus.google.com/[your Google+ ID number]/posts. Copy your Google+ ID number to your clipboard.
- There are several RSS/Atom feed-to-Twitter applications available; I use one of the most popular and easiest to use, Twitterfeed. You can log into it via OpenID, i.e. using your Google or Twitter account, so you don't have to remember a new password. So, log into Twitterfeed (or an alternative of your choice)
- Create a new feed, selecting the options of your choice, but using the following as your feed URL: http://plusfeed.appspot.com/[your Google+ ID number]
Select the minimum refresh period (currently 30 minutes) and post up to the maximum number of posts at a time (currently 5).
