When it first launched in 2004, Facebook swept across college campuses and became forever embedded in our popular culture.
Just two short years later, anyone older than 13 could join, making the social networking site one of the most popular sites on the Internet with 60 million registered users.
It became so popular, in fact, that a 2006 study found that college students named the site as the second most "in" thing, tied with beer and sex - losing only to the ubiquitous iPod.
So how could something that became as popular as two of the most common college traditions go so wrong in just a few years after its creation?
Even though many of us enjoyed the welcomed distraction of friending, tagging and poking people for countless hours, it soon became apparent that Facebook was going to have to do more than connect us with our friends to hold our attention - and keep turning a profit.
And it was downhill from there.
Unfortunately, to accomplish its revenue goal, the creator of the billion-dollar Facebook decided it would have to sell our privacy to the highest bidder. And with the extremely profitable market that the site had captured so quickly, it wasn't unexpected.
Sure, students quickly caught on that maybe posting everything on Facebook wasn't such a good idea.
When public scandals involving inappropriate photo postings continued to make the news on campuses across the country, users became more selective about what they were posting on the site. After all, not everyone wanted the world to see documented proof of a typical weekend's worth of their debauchery.
However, the more clandestine, corporate violations of personal privacy that a Facebook account might allow were not so obvious to the millions of the site's devotees.
We can trace the beginning of the end of Facebook as we knew it to Nov. 7.
The site introduced Facebook Beacon, a marketing scheme that includes a system to allow users to share information about their activities on other Web sites.
When people realized that what they purchased or viewed on these "partner Web sites" was immediately published on Facebook without their permission, red flags went up across cyberspace.
Realizing the potential for destructive blows to his company's net worth, founder Mark Zuckerberg made yet another public apology for the way that a new application was launched.
Beacon was later changed to require that any actions transmitted to the site would have to be approved by the user.
But, by then, the damage was already done.
So, when it was revealed last week that Facebook is now the target of an investigation from the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office, it came as no surprise to us.
The site is currently facing questions about how it protects users' data after someone complained that the social network did not fully delete their information even after they had terminated their account.
We won't try to deny the potential benefits of having a Facebook account, which is why we were so infatuated with it in the first place - hell, you can even friend the Alligator if you want. But we continue to be disappointed with the way the site is transforming into another tool for corporate America's quest to acquire more consumers at the expense of personal privacy.
The once genius idea generated from a Harvard student's dorm room has become a corporate pirate holding hostage something some people would be willing to pay any price to have access to - our information.
