Thank you, Facebook

Kenny was one of my good friends from elementary school. A small gang of us would hang out, ride bikes, go to the pool, ice skate at the lake, have rock fights, start fires. The usual stuff 10-year-olds do.

Kenny goes by Ken now. I have seen him in person exactly once in the decades since high school, at our 10-year reunion. But we're still in touch. You know how? Through Facebook.

And even though the anti-Facebook backlash, which has been going on since about five minutes after Facebook was invented, continues unabated, Kenny-now-Ken has just added Act Like You Mean Business to the syllabus for a course he teaches at a major university back East.

All because of a status update he posted one day about being an English professor suddenly stuck teaching a business writing class.

He didn't adopt the book because we used to blow up my sisters' old Barbie dolls with firecrackers. Far from it. He was skeptical and I had to work for this sale, with a multitude of suggestions for exercises and homework assignments.

But I never would have known about it if not for Facebook.

There's surely a lot of nonsense there, from Farmville to that stupid ticker, but in all that stewy bathwater is a baby worth saving.