If you're talking about standard Google Web Search, then Twitter has never explicitly affected SEO. However, Google did strike a deal to have access to Twitter's API (aka the "firehose") for its Realtime search, which was discontinued earlier this month. This led to a better understanding of what would potentially be a trending topic in the organic search space, leading to more Universal SERPs including the realtime module. So in a way, it did affect SEO (quality deserves freshness = if the search query is related to recent events, then Google would serve up newer content on the first page). Google also tried its best to identify popular links. Within the realtime results, it would "unshorten" links and then aggregate all mentions of it to show how many people in total shared a page. This was no doubt to help discover new/trending topics, but also to give weight to a link's popularity with social signals, much like how backlinks have factored into the algorithm for PageRank (this is all just logical speculation).
After the Google/Twitter deal ended, Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz conducted a few informal studies via Twitter to see if Google would still be able to discover/index content via Twitter; the answer? a resounding no.
Industry-wide speculation was that Google + was to replace the value of the Twitter stream (the timing of the launch seems about right). In my personal opinion, Google loves to control data, and that was something they never really could do with Twitter. Do I think Google + does or will affect SEO? Definitely. How and to what extent remains to be seen!
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