When asked why they liked Google+ for mobile devices, respondents said Google's wide range of assets -- search, Gmail, YouTube and Android -- together create a powerful network effect when combined with Google+.

The survey findings ( ) are from Appcelerator and research firm IDC, which is owned by IDG, the parent company of Computerworld. The findings are based on two surveys conducted in 2011 and updated with a third in January involving more than 2,100 respondents. All of the respondents were Appcelerator customers -- developers who use the company's software tools to build mobile apps.

Facebook already has a huge lead over Google+, with 425 million mobile users and 900 million overall users.

"It might be expected that Facebook would be vastly more important to social strategies [for mobile developers] than Google," the authors wrote. "However mobile app developers see the world differently, with potentially significant impacts to how social plays out in the mobile space, especially for the next billion social users."

The authors noted that in the most recent survey, 39% of developers said that the network effect of all of Google's assets like search and Android "are more important to them than Facebook's social graph."