As Internet Company AOL has joined hands with online news site, The Huffington Post, it has appointed Twitter’s Co-Founder Biz Stone as its strategic adviser. Biz is a renowned name in the Silicon Valley and one of the Twitter’s chief evangelists and most prominent spokespersons. He’ll now work on cause-based initiatives for the new era of digital publishing.

Early this morning, Biz said that he is partnering with the Huffington Post in order to “rally companies to think about new ways of doing business.”

The deal between AOL and The Huffington Post was closed at an amount of $315 million. While this is a really good development for AOL, it’s only the latest in a string of related developments.  There’s also the hiring of a new batch of people in its Huffington Post Media Group. As of now, Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post, is the group’s president and editor-in-chief. AOL has hired John Montario as culture and entertainment editor. He has previously worked for New York Times and the Los Angeles times as Editor. Howard Fineman is appointed as the Editorial Director of the group. On the other hand, the company is also shedding around 20% of its total workforce in order to drive the turnaround of its business. This includes Josh Topolsky, the editor-in-chief at AOL technology blog Engadget too.

It sounds like a preparation for Twitter to become directly involved with AOL’s new media efforts, which are heavy on digital content distribution. As Twitter builds its ad network, its social mechanisms could be valuable for the new AOL- Huffington Post initiative. We also heard it showing a distinctive attitude towards app developers in an effort to control its ecosystem and dealing with issues like privacy, trademark infringement and content.

As social search is a contributing factor to Twitter’s success figures, we saw HootSuite releasing a social analytics tool extremely useful for webmasters and website owners. It has also made some significant updates to its Ecosystem including Quick Bar Update as one of them. Additionally, it also fixed some crashed experiences faced by the users and updated Tweetdeck.

The move by AOL is part of a larger strategy that’s getting a head start on new media distribution, which is shifting print media into current-day behavior.  A recent study notes the important milestone, with “more people now get their news from online sources than they do from physical newspapers.” Revealing some interesting figures, the survey reported that around 46 percent people get their news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40%) for the first time. Conducted by Nielsen Media Research, the survey also suggests as much as 47 percent of Americans get local news from their cell-phone including weather and restaurant information, which is quite interesting.  It’s an affect we know first hand at SiliconAngle. Even our own Editor in Chief Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins praises the algorithm-aided news tools on the web, while exercising patience in efficiency at SXSW this week.