In his 1:1 at All Things D this week, Twitter’s CEO was asked about his (Twitter’s) interactions with other tech companies. Are they friends?

Spoiler alert! No.

But Apple is different, Apple is . . . Twitter’s everything.

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First Facebook swoops in and steals Instagram away from Twitter and then it hijacks Twitter’s hashtag and now it’s targeting the blue tick – THE BLUE TICK!

Stay calm.

We expect it will re-envision groups as chat rooms some time in the future and start wearing similar clothes and other Single White Female-style things.

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Yahoo recently announced it would be showing tweets in its real-time search results – and that’s awesome for everyone involved, Yahoo, Twitter, you, me – and should worry Google.

But maybe Twitter should actually be a bit worried too, because Yahoo obviously plans to be at the top of the technology pyramid and one of the companies it must step on in its climb to the top is its new friend, Twitter.

And this has been made crystal clear by Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr.

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You’ll remember, once upon a time, tweets were top dog in Google search. And then that relationship dissolved in a sea of vagueness and although you’ll see tweets come up in Google searches today, they’re noticeably appearing after the more Google-y bits of information (like news stories and such, capable of being +1′d on Google+). This is, of course, just as the Twitter Oracle predicted.

But enough about Google, we’re talking Yahoo here. And Yahoo is busy cozying up with Twitter, much to (we imagine) someone at Google’s chagrin who must be thinking, “Maybe Yahoo isn’t as irrelevant as we thought!”

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Everyone wants to be a “social platform” these days. From Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters to the re-imagined MySpace, heck even Taco Bell is trying to position itself as a “platform” – TacOS?

And now we have BlackBerry making an end run to snag the “social platform” golden ring away from those slackers (Twitter, Facebook and Google+) by introducing “channels.”

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Twitter competitor App.net (ADN) has progressed from a paid members-only platform to a freemium model (a few months ago), with free accounts available only to those invited by paying members.

And now it announced it is allowing anyone to join with an App.net Passport account.

Is the next step a free toaster with every sign up?

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If you haven’t noticed, Twitter is slowly but surely taking over online, adding video and music to its already wildly popular service and attracting new users (their product) and advertisers (their pay day) in droves.

And just when you thought they were full to the brim with new business, the greedy little bird comes back out for more – and this time it appears they plan to target Foursquare’s worm.

How so? Well, Twitter is rumored to be working on local tweet discovery and once they’ve nailed THAT (and they will), how long till they start offering this service (with offers targeting local tweeters) to their advertisers? And that’s the EXACT value proposition Foursquare peddles.

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Twitter finally has a patent on Twitter – and although many are saying it will be easy to invalidate in court AND (besides that) Twitter is supposedly not interested in going on the ‘patent offense,’ some platform developers must be shaking in their old school sneakers.

And we’re guessing one very vocal anti-Twitter, Twitter is feeling a little sick: App.net.

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Remember when you had to get invited to gmail? It was THE email to have for a short period of time because of that little marketing gimmick. And then folks were given limitless invitations and snagging access wasn’t quite so special any more.

Well, App.net – or ADN as the cool kids call it – is now doing something similar, with the same goal in mind: ratcheting up its desirability and giving membership a boost.

But will it work?

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Twitter’s disconnects from seemingly simpatico platforms is well-known, but the part folks don’t usually focus on is this: Twitter is actually helping these Twitter-addicted tech platforms (in a round-about way).

How?

Much like LinkedIn after it split with Twitter, Instagram is realizing it’s actually better off without the mircoblogging monkey on its back.

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