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The discussion about Facebook experienced a tipping point last week: third-party data confirmed what many observers had been suggesting, that Facebook exerts a powerful influence on how consumers are using the web.

Sheer scale is the first hurdle. Compete released data that showed Facebook outstripping Google in terms of web visits in January, a significant accomplishment.

Then, generating measurable activity across the web from that scale is the second hurdle.

SFGate, in an article using Compete! data, concluded that Facebook is driving more traffic to web sites than any other site. In fact, Facebook is the single biggest source of traffic to the web portals, like Google and Yahoo.

Using a snapshot of Web traffic from December, Compete’s director of online media and search, Jessica Ong, found that 15 percent of traffic to major Web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook and MySpace. The lion’s share of that traffic, 13 percent came from Facebook.

Google, which has profited handsomely from directing Web surfers to their destinations during the past decade, was third with 7 percent, just behind e-commerce site eBay, which had 7.61 percent. MySpace was fourth with just under 2 percent.

These two data points illustrates that a consumer’s internet experience has evolved from being self- directed to group-directed. Typing search terms into Google is becoming a secondary activity to following the map of the web that is being constantly updated by your social circle.

“People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends’ recommendations or their friends’ activities,” said Dave Yovanno, chief executive of Gigya Inc., a Palo Alto firm that offers social-media services. “That’s one of the big trends we started picking up on probably four or five months ago.”

One of the reasons that consumer behavior is shifting is because of the innate authenticity of their social circle. This experience of authenticity is increased the reliability of the information that people provide about themselves. The University of Texas at Austin recently released a study showing that profiles on social networks are generally very truthful.

“I was surprised by the findings, because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves,” study co-author Sam Gosling, a personality and social psychologist in the department of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, said in a statement. “But these findings suggest that online social networks are not so much about providing a positive spin for the profile owners, but are instead just another medium for engaging in genuine social interactions.”

We’ve been talking about a new web paradigm. Clearly, it is here.

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