Facebook has been an integral part of my college experience. When I started my freshman year in the fall of 2005, the site was still relatively new and unheard of. I only learned about it by word-of-mouth, when one of my best friend’s older sisters told us about “this amazing website” that we “just had to join.” Back then, Facebook was only for those of us privileged with a .edu email address, and I remember being outraged (for all of two days) when the site was opened to high schoolers and my younger sister was allowed to join. I’ve had plenty of other “I hate you, Facebook” moments since then. I can admit to being one of those people who “hated” the newsfeed when it was first introduced and grew to love it less than a month later.

But through all of the changes to its layout and the controversy surrounding its privacy settings, I still love Facebook for the simple reason that it really does help me stay in touch with my friends who are now scattered across the country. In fact, I get pretty frustrated with people who say they “just don’t do Facebook,” call it stupid or (even more preposterously) evil. Of course these people are entitled to their own opinion, and yes I suppose that Facebook can become an addiction for some, but I don’t think that the majority of these nay-sayers understand what a helpful medium of communication Facebook is.

Let me explain. Until I was 18, all of my friends were in Dallas, Texas, the city in which I was born and raised. Then I went to college at Louisiana State University, seven hours’ drive east of Dallas, and suddenly I needed a way to keep in touch with my high school best friends who I no longer saw on a regular basis. And what helped me do that? You guessed it: Facebook. Of course, I made wonderful friends in Baton Rouge, Louisiana too, and I needed some way to stay in touch with them every summer when I went back home to Dallas. Yep. That’s right. Facebook made that possible. By the time I was a senior in college, I had studied abroad in France and left behind friends from several European countries. I had also spent a summer working as a camp counselor with college students from all across the continent. How was I supposed to remain friends with them all? Why by Facebook friending them, of course.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not claiming that Facebook has some miraculous power to make friendships last, only that, if you want to preserve a friendship, Facebook is a useful tool. This fact really hit home to me last week, when I was back in Baton Rouge visiting my friends from undergrad. You see, after I graduated from LSU, I moved even farther east, to Athens, Georgia, to attend grad school at the University of Georgia. In the two years that I spent in grad school, I only saw my LSU friends three times. And yet, last week, I didn’t feel the need to spend hours catching up on all the goings-on in their lives, because I already knew a great deal of what was happening. I’d read it in status updates, seen it in photos and talked about it in comments, messages and chats. As a result, we could spend less time filling each other in on memories of what had happened since we last saw each other and more time making new memories together.

And that, dear readers, is the one-hundred-and-forty-second reason that I love Facebook.