"Loses access"? It sounds more like they let it expire on purpose. And to me it sounds like a strong message to Twitter and everybody, that G is really serious about G+. "We don't need Twitter, we have our own stream pretty soon."
I read it the other way; that Twitter were upset about G+ and wouldn't re-sign.
I noted a [deleted] post at the bottom of this thread, where the replies indicate that "Twitter couldn't have known about G+", hence I guess the [deleted] post had similar sentiments to me. Google having social aspirations has been well-known for a long time. I could very much imagine Twitter writing a contract which says that the stream was only available to Google for as long as Google wasn't directly competing with Twitter. Google couldn't sign such a contract. Google+ is direct Twitter competition.
the original story on SEL outlined some of the smaller details and intricacies of what is happening here. Namely that Google and Bing signed their firehose deals with Twitter at the same time for the same contract length, but only Google has been shutoff now - which suggests that Twitter and Google couldn't come to an agreement for some reason (but I doubt it was financial)
I thought that was an important point in the original story[1], but Mashable didn't copy and paste that far down
Google sees this feature as advantageous to Twitter, just as much as Twitter sees it as advantageous to Google. Negotiates to extend the contract could have failed for any number of reasons.
Without access to the firehose, Google cannot derive any value from tweets, but without Google's help, there's a good change that Twitter can improve their own real-time search. So I would say that Twitter is in the stronger negotiating position here, especially since with Buzz and Google+, Google is trying to create its own firehose of user-created realtime content.
